John Updike Quotes

All blessings are mixed blessings. ~ 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

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

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? ~ John Updike

The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. ~ John Updike

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. ~ John Updike

John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience. ~ Mark Bowden

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other. ~ John Updike

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. ~ John Updike

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. ~ John Updike

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter. ~ John Updike

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep. ~ John Updike

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

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

Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace. ~ John Updike

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

The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare. ~ John Updike

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. ~ John Updike

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

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing. ~ John Updike

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. ~ John Updike

A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking. ~ John Updike

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers. ~ John Updike

You are still you. The U.S. is still the U.S., held together by credit cards and Indian names ~ John Updike

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works. ~ John Updike

We love too late... Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or give back speech truly? ~ John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. ~ John Updike

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. ~ John Updike

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

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

But the young educated adults of the 90s
who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully
got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself. ~ David Foster Wallace

It's spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod - Small letters sent To her from God. ~ John Updike

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. ~ John Updike

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. ~ John Updike

All love comes from the family. ~ John Updike

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. ~ John Updike

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. ~ John Updike

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies. ~ John Updike

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. ~ John Updike

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much. ~ 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

I think books should have secrets, like people do. ~ John Updike

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. ~ John Updike

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work. ~ John Updike

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good. ~ John Updike

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

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

Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard. ~ John Updike

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? ~ John Updike

Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania, simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who haven't even a fraction of Updike's talent and yet must hoe the same arid patch for stories. No ~ Teju Cole

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. ~ John Updike

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer. ~ John Updike

A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body. ~ John Updike

Authors should be honored only for their works. ~ John Updike

Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. ~ John Updike

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. ~ John Updike

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle. ~ John Updike

This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say - 'One world at a time'? ~ John Updike

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. ~ John Updike

Love makes the air light. ~ John Updike

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

No act is so private it does not seek applause. ~ John Updike

I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike. ~ Stephen King

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

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

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. ~ John Updike

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. ~ 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

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. ~ John Updike

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

I have never liked haircuts. ~ John Updike

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. ~ John Updike

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons
at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. ~ John Updike

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. ~ John Updike

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. ~ John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. ~ John Updike

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being. ~ John Updike

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. ~ John Updike

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had. ~ John Updike

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

Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. ~ John Updike

But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. ~ John Updike

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. ~ John Updike

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. ~ 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

They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him. ~ John Updike

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. ~ John Updike

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times. ~ John Updike

It wasn't until I started to read short stories - by people like Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, John Updike ... Eudora Welty - that I became excited about the possibilities of writing. ~ Carol Windley

Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography. ~ John Updike

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. ~ John Updike

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands. ~ John Updike

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot. ~ John Updike

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

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

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

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

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. ~ John Updike

In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.
We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves. ~ John Updike

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light. ~ John Updike