John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

John Updike
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

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
For a Jew to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there at all – up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides.

John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

John Updike
What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.

John Updike
[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

John Updike
About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be.

John Updike
Also, I do have a romantic weakness for gags—we called ourselves, the term itself a gag, gagsters. My own speciality was Chinese jokes.

John Updike
I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.

John Updike
When you're young, you're so impotent you cannot help but strive and observe and feel.

John Updike
I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

John Updike
Welcome, welcome, little star I'm delighted that you are Up in Heaven's vast extent, No bigger than a continent.

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

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

John Updike
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

John Updike
What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

John Updike
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

John Updike
You offer cheer to tiny Man 'Mid galaxies Gargantuan A little pill in endless night, An antidote to cosmic fright.
White Dwarf

John Updike
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

John Updike
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

John Updike
Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

John Updike
You need no more or less than three dimensions to make a knot, a knot that tightens on itself and won't pull apart, and that's what the ultimate particles are — knots in space-time. You can't make a knot in two dimensions because there's no over or under.

John Updike
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

John Updike
The Milky Way, which used to be thought of as the path by which the souls of the dead traveled to Heaven, is an optical illusion; you could never reach it. Like fog, it would always thin out around you. It's a mist of stars we make by looking the long way through the galaxy.

John Updike
Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.

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

John Updike
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

John Updike