Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Updike Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Updike.

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Famous Quotes By John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1747464

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1215926

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1618286

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 439112

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving ... ' — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 872595

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' — John Updike

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One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 649764

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. — John Updike

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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it. — John Updike

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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. — John Updike

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What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1392494

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1512230

Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went. — John Updike

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I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — John Updike

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Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. — John Updike

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A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. — John Updike

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We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living. — John Updike

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I like short stories. — John Updike

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Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there ... Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. — John Updike

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I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. — John Updike

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I have never liked haircuts. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 537401

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. — John Updike

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Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1519475

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years' experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves. — John Updike

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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike

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A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. — John Updike

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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1501521

A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. — John Updike

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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. — John Updike

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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. — John Updike

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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1443110

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy's idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city. — John Updike

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Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1409866

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1390545

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1331718

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars. — John Updike

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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. — John Updike

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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. — John Updike

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It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt. — John Updike

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You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure ... — John Updike

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I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. — John Updike

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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 2147910

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids down a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And, scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me. Like tall
And painless guillotines they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed - you call
It wonderful; I call it crass. — John Updike

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I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. — John Updike

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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain. — John Updike

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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays ... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1915426

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1624702

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1901000

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top. — John Updike

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All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1856644

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. — John Updike

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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried. — John Updike

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I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. — John Updike

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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. — John Updike

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That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. — John Updike

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Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. — John Updike

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In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. — John Updike

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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. — John Updike

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We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything — John Updike

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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it. — John Updike

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My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. — John Updike

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When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. — John Updike

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A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. — John Updike

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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. — John Updike

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I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 321740

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. — John Updike

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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other. — John Updike

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Nature refuses to rest. — John Updike

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I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. — John Updike

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The first breathe of adultery is the freest. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 237414

In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy
the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem. — John Updike

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My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. — John Updike

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My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 192307

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 177257

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. — John Updike

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Growth is betrayal. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 125271

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 118643

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. — John Updike

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How many more, I must ask myself,
such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness? — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 90514

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. — John Updike

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I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition. — John Updike

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I drive my car to supermarket,
The way I take is superhigh,
A superlot is where I park it,
And Super Suds are what I buy.
Supersalesmen sell me tonic -
Super-Tone-O, for Relief.
The planes I ride are supersonic.
In trains, I like the Super Chief.
Supercilious men and women
Call me superficial - me,
Who so superbly learned to swim in
Supercolossality.
Superphosphate-fed foods feed me;
Superservice keeps me new.
Who would dare to supersede me,
Super-super-superwho? — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1214884

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes 1162782

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider ... I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind. — John Updike

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Being on TV is like being alive, only more so. — John Updike

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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination. — John Updike

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Belief, like love, must be voluntary. — John Updike

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Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors. — John Updike

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One does not go to Moscow to get fat. — John Updike

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We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition - not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark. — John Updike

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As the six, in file, passed into the poorhouse proper they clicked off glances of disdain with industrial precision. — John Updike

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I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. — John Updike

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I like middles ... It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. — John Updike

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The fucking world is running out of gas. — John Updike

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Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward. — John Updike

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That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be. — John Updike

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God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb. — John Updike

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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. — John Updike

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I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. — John Updike

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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. — John Updike

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... he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [ ... ] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? — John Updike