John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'

John Updike
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

John Updike
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

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
I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

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

John Updike
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

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

John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

John Updike
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

John Updike
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

John Updike
Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

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
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

John Updike
Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

John Updike
The most miraculous thing is happening. The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. "Mr. Kohler, What kind of God is showing through, exactly?"

John Updike
When, on those anvils at the center of stars, and those even more furious anvils of the exploding supernovae, the heavy elements were beaten together to the atomic number 94...

John Updike
I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.

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

John Updike
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

John Updike
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

John Updike
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

John Updike
Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

John Updike
A post-heroic herbivore, I come to breakfast liking for A bite. Behind the box of Brex I find Tyrannosaurus rex.

John Updike
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

John Updike
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

John Updike
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

John Updike
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

John Updike