Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about John Updike
John Updike Quotes
357 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
Source
Report...
Things go bad. Food goes bad, people go bad, maybe a whole country goes bad. The blacks now have more than ever, but it feels like less, maybe. We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything.
John Updike
Source
Report...
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike
Source
Report...
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
Source
Report...
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John Updike
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
Source
Report...
The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
John Updike
Source
Report...
... they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.
John Updike
Source
Report...
... the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
John Updike
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
John Updike
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
John Updike
Source
Report...
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike
Source
Report...
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.
John Updike
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
[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
Source
Report...
[Thelma] "... We're too old to keep being foolish."
John Updike
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
15
Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
John Updike
1960s © W. Earl Snyder
Born:
March 18, 1932
Died:
January 27, 2009
(aged 76)
Bio:
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Known for:
Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
The Centaur (1963)
Most used words:
people
life
time
feel
love
men
nelson
golf
god
years
kind
children
women
sense
parents
John Updike on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
John Updike Quotes
John Updike Short Quotes
Quotes about John Updike
American Novelist Quotes
Novelist Quotes
20th-century Novelist Quotes
Related People
Philip Roth
American Novelist
John Cheever
American Novelist
Saul Bellow
American Novelist
William Faulkner
American Author
Norman Mailer
American Journalist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes