John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
[Thelma] "... You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

John Updike
History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

John Updike
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

John Updike
... This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.

John Updike
[Pru] "... He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."

John Updike
[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

John Updike
[Thelma] "... We're too old to keep being foolish."

John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike
[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."

John Updike
[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

John Updike
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

John Updike
I've never much enjoyed going to plays…The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook.

John Updike