John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

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 mad things dreamt up in the sky Discomfort our philosophy.

John Updike
Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.

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
My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

John Updike
And I'm not sure it isn't a bit heretical of you to toss the fact of God in with a lot of other facts. Even Aquinas, I think, didn't postulate a God Who could be hauled kicking and screaming out from some laboratory closet, over behind the blackboard.

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

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
Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

John Updike
There is infinitely more nothing in the universe than anything else.

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

John Updike
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

John Updike
Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

John Updike
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

John Updike
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

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
Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There's something in it! Points, potential geometry. A kind of dust of structurless points. Or, if that's too woolly for you, try "a Borel set of points not yet assembled into a manifold of any particular dimensionality."

John Updike
The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word "poison." "That's the weight of the Sun," Caldwell said.

John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

John Updike
And beyond our galaxy are other galaxies, in the universe all told at least a hundred billion, each containing a hundred billion stars. Do these figures mean anything to you?

John Updike
The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

John Updike
How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

John Updike
All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

John Updike
The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

John Updike