Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

103. “Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

105. “God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.”

— John Updike

106. “The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

108. “I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.”

— John Updike

109. “You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.”

— John Updike

110. “The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.”

— John Updike

111. “The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.”

— John Updike

112. “We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

— John Updike

113. “The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”

— John Updike

114. “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

— John Updike

115. “Cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

117. “We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.”

— John Updike

118. “It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.”

— John Updike

119. “People go around mourning the death of God; it’s the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren’t people any more, they’re just ssoul-less sheep.”

— John Updike

120. “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

121. “Writing doesn’t require drive. It’s like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.”

— John Updike

122. “Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

— John Updike

123. “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

124. “How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”

— John Updike

125. “The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.”

— John Updike

126. “Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

— John Updike

127. “Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?”

— John Updike

128. “Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.”

— John Updike

129. “Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.”

— John Updike

130. “Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through.”

— John Updike

131. “Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

— John Updike

132. “An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”

— John Updike

133. “The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

— John Updike

134. “We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.”

— John Updike

135. “In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.”

— John Updike

136. “Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.”

— John Updike

137. “You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they’re right.”

— John Updike

138. “The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.”

— John Updike

139. “Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.”

— John Updike

140. “In general the churches... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola: they promoted thirst without quenching it.”

— John Updike

141. “It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.”

— John Updike

142. “The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.”

— John Updike

143. “If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”

— John Updike

144. “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

— John Updike

145. “How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.”

— John Updike

146. “Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.”

— John Updike

147. “I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.”

— John Updike

148. “Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility.”

— John Updike

149. “Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?”

— John Updike

150. “Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.”

— John Updike