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Updike's Quotes & Sayings

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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

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

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

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. — John Updike

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

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

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

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

One recalls John Updike's argument: the only evidence for the existence of God is the collective human yearning that it should be so. — Martin Amis

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

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

There's something very reassuring ... about the written record. — John Updike

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. — John Updike

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

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded. — John Updike

Tillie Olsen. James Joyce. Robert Stone. I must have read Updike's Rabbit, Run five times and Bellow's Herzog — Pamela Paul

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. — John Updike

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike

I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes. — Caroline Thompson

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

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more. — John Updike

I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. — John Updike

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

Mozart's music gives us permission to live. — 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

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

Music affected him as women's talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener. — John Updike

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

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

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

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

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. — John Updike

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

With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks — John Updike

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors. — Florence King

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

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror. — 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

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God — John Updike

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. — 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

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

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. — John Updike

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. — John Updike

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models. — 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