Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

— John Updike

3. “Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.”

— John Updike

4. “Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.”

— John Updike

5. “Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

— John Updike

6. “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

— John Updike

7. “Human was the music, natural was the static.”

— John Updike

8. “If you have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.”

— John Updike

9. “Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

— John Updike

10. “Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.”

— John Updike

11. “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

— John Updike

12. “I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”

— John Updike

13. “You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

— John Updike

14. “Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.”

— John Updike

15. “We are most alive when we’re in love.”

— John Updike

16. “Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.”

— John Updike

17. “Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

— John Updike

18. “Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?”

— John Updike

19. “A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.”

— John Updike

20. “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

— John Updike

21. “The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”

— John Updike

22. “But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it.”

— John Updike

23. “Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.”

— John Updike

24. “Fraud makes the world go round.”

— John Updike

25. “What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

— John Updike

26. “The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”

— John Updike

27. “A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.”

— John Updike

28. “I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.”

— John Updike

29. “You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.”

— John Updike

30. “Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.”

— John Updike

31. “The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.”

— John Updike

32. “It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod – Small letters sent To her from God.”

— John Updike

33. “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.”

— John Updike

34. “The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.”

— John Updike

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35. “If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”

— John Updike

36. “We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

— John Updike

37. “It’s not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.”

— John Updike

38. “The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.”

— John Updike

39. “We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.”

— John Updike

40. “All blessings are mixed blessings.”

— John Updike

41. “The – writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.”

— John Updike

42. “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

43. “Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

— John Updike

44. “It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.”

— John Updike

45. “I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.”

— John Updike

46. “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

47. “Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.”

— John Updike

48. “Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.”

— John Updike

49. “In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.”

— John Updike

50. “Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.”

— John Updike