John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

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

John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

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

John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

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

John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

John Updike
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

John Updike
Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"

John Updike
Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece. What is eventually left is someone else.

John Updike
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

John Updike
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

John Updike
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.

John Updike
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

John Updike
As in marriage, there is sharing [in golf]; we search for one another's lost balls, we comment helpfully upon one another's defective swings, we march more or less in the same direction, and we come together, like couples at breakfast and dinner, on the tees and on the greens.

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
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

John Updike
... the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

John Updike
... they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

John Updike
The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.

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

John Updike
Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.

John Updike
Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

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
Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.

John Updike
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

John Updike
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

John Updike