A&p Updike Quotes & Sayings

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. — John Updike

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? — John Updike

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. — John Updike

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment. — Rick Moody

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. — John Updike

Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. — John Updike

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. — John Updike

His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. — John Updike

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

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe — John Updike

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. — John Updike

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. The reason de Sade was preferable was that his shocking sex scenes weren't about sex but politics. They were therefore anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois, anti-patriarchal, and anti-everything a smart young feminist should be against. — Jeffrey Eugenides

And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic, which took a whole life to develop and market - the quips, the witticisms, the slant adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest the lip of the stage . . . - JOHN UPDIKE, "Perfection Wasted — Carole Radziwill

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. — John Updike

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny. — John Updike

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

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God. — John Updike

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. — John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. — John Updike

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts. — John Updike

Hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him. — John Updike

I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story. — T.C. Boyle

Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. — John Updike

The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skin
as minutes drop from life, a wristy piece
of dogged ugliness, its labors meant
to carve from language beauty, that beauty which
lifts free of flesh to find itself in print — John Updike

Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. — John Updike

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago. — John Updike

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. — John Updike

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

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. — John Updike

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. — John Updike

The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified. — John Updike

Irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it. — John Updike

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did. — John Updike

He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons. — John Updike

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves. — John Updike

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

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. — John Updike

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

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

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. — John Updike

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish. — John Updike

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. — John Updike

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. — John Updike

The days are short,
The sun a spark
Hung thin between
The dark and dark. — John Updike

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. — John Updike

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel. — Junot Diaz

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. — John Updike

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing. — John Updike

I wrote every day throughout my twenties. For a while, I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and he practiced every day. He played scales; I wrote small fictional scenes. It was the same idea - to keep your hand in your craft, to stay close to it. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration at all, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and scribble something, anything. I had read an interview with John Updike where he said that some of the best novels you've ever read were written in an hour a day; I figured I could always carve out at least thirty minutes somewhere to dedicate myself to my work, no matter what else was going on or how badly I believed the work was going. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms. Now, — John Updike

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. — John Updike

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. — John Updike

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. — John Updike

Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time. — John Updike

His silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair - its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. — John Updike

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. — John Updike

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up. — John Updike

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike. — Martin Amis

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick. — John Updike

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. — John Updike

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

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

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline. — John Updike

The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything - dead meat, living meat, old bones - — John Updike

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

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. — John Updike

As all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality. — John Updike

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee. — John Updike

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. — John Updike

The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. — John Updike

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. — John Updike

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age? — John Updike

(on Updike) Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought? — David Foster Wallace

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. — John Updike

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. — John Updike

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

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

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. — John Updike

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia. — John Updike

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

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing. — John Niven

Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back. — John Updike

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. — John Updike

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did. — George Saunders

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway. — John Updike

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

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea. — John Updike

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. — John Updike

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

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle. — John Updike

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. — John Updike

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. — John Updike

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. — John Updike

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

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. — John Updike

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. — John Updike

Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree? — John Updike

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

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. — John Updike

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. — John Updike