John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

John Updike
[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."

John Updike
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike
"Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?"

John Updike
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

John Updike
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

John Updike
Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.

John Updike
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

John Updike
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

John Updike
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

John Updike
It's not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

John Updike
Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

John Updike
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

John Updike
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and…he does it without destroying something else.

John Updike
I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

John Updike
Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

John Updike
Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece. What is eventually left is someone else.

John Updike
But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

John Updike
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Updike
[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..."

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
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

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

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

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

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
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
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