Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A computer and a cat are somewhat alike – they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don’t necessarily share.”

— John Updike

52. “The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

— John Updike

53. “I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is – its irresistible charm – a fire.”

— John Updike

54. “There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.”

— John Updike

55. “Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say – or more – a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.”

— John Updike

56. “And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.”

— John Updike

57. “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”

— John Updike

58. “Without rain, there would be no life.”

— John Updike

59. “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”

— John Updike

60. “What we need is progress with an escape hatch.”

— John Updike

61. “Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”

— John Updike

62. “Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.”

— John Updike

63. “School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”

— John Updike

64. “On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.”

— John Updike

65. “Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.”

— John Updike

66. “What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.”

— John Updike

67. “To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.”

— John Updike

68. “The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.”

— John Updike

69. “Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.”

— John Updike

70. “Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

— John Updike

71. “Chaos is God’s body. Order is the Devil’s chains.”

— John Updike

72. “Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.”

— John Updike

73. “A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

— John Updike

74. “Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.”

— John Updike

75. “As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven.”

— John Updike

76. “There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.”

— John Updike

77. “We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

— John Updike

78. “Women are an alien race set down among us.”

— John Updike

79. “I’m not against TV; I don’t go on the morning talk shows because I’m not invited. If I was, I might go.”

— John Updike

80. “If you’re telling me I’m not mature, that’s one thing I don’t cry over since as far as I can make out it’s the same thing as being dead.”

— John Updike

81. “A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”

— John Updike

82. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.”

— John Updike

83. “Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”

— John Updike

84. “Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.”

— John Updike

85. “Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.”

— John Updike

86. “Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.”

— John Updike

87. “Walking toward the light. None of us lives in the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us.”

— John Updike

88. “The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.”

— John Updike

89. “What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

— John Updike

90. “The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter.”

— John Updike

91. “Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”

— John Updike

92. “I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we’ve been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you’re morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You’re not even interesting enough to make me sick.”

— John Updike

93. “Women, fire in their crotch, won’t burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.”

— John Updike

94. “In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.”

— John Updike

95. “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.”

— John Updike

96. “Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”

— John Updike

97. “Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

— John Updike

98. “A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true.”

— John Updike

99. “A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.”

— John Updike

100. “Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

— John Updike