John Updike Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by John Updike
John Updike Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from John Updike on Wise Famous Quotes.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
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
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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.
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
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.
This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say - 'One world at a time'?
He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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.
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.
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.
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
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.
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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.
The books of the 1920s and '30s that are most inviting, with their handy size, generous margins, and sharp letterpress type.
Students present themselves ... like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.