John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Updike