Updike Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Updike

Updike Quotes & Sayings

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Writing makes you more human. — John Updike

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life. — John Updike

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. — John Updike

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. — 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

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead. — John Updike

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems. — Jonathan Galassi

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. — John Updike

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes. — John Updike

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much. — John Updike

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. — John Updike

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. — John Updike

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. — John Updike

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose. — Nicholson Baker

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. — John Updike

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song. — John Updike

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. — John Updike

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

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. — John Updike

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

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

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. — John Updike

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

First snow: it came this year late in November. — John Updike

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. — John Updike

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway. — John Updike

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

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. — John Updike

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. — John Updike

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? — John Updike

In no other sport must the spectator move. — John Updike

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? — John Updike

John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student. — M.H. Abrams

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record. — John Updike

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. — John Updike

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — John Updike

He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. — John Updike

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. — John Updike

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. — John Updike

We shed skins in life, to keep living. — John Updike

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. — John Updike

Growth is betrayal. — John Updike

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. — John Updike

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. — John Updike

Mozart's music gives us permission to live. — John Updike

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. — John Updike

Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor. — 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

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products. — John Updike

Sex is like money; only too much is enough. — John Updike

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
— John Updike

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die. — John Updike

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do. — John Updike

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? — John Updike

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. — John Updike

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us. — John Updike

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide. — John Updike

What we need is progress with an escape hatch. — John Updike

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

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due. — 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

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

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. — John Updike

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. — John Updike

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

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was. — John Updike

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. — John Updike

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. — John Updike

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

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. — John Updike

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses. — John Updike

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. — John Updike

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

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

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

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes. — John Updike

I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless. — 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

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

Love makes the air light. — John Updike

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. — John Updike

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. — John Updike

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. — John Updike

Nature refuses to rest. — John Updike

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

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

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

Being a great writer is not the same as writing great. — John Updike

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. — John Updike

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. — 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

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

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

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

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. — John Updike

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

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. — John Updike

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself. — John Updike

All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it's hurting someone else. — John Updike