John Updike Quotes

357 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

John Updike
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
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
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

John Updike
It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

John Updike
[Nelson] "... One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

John Updike
[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

John Updike
..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

John Updike
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

John Updike
I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

John Updike
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

John Updike
[Nelson] "... People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

John Updike
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

John Updike
You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

John Updike
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

John Updike
Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

John Updike