Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I think it’s the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page.”

— John Updike

152. “The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”

— John Updike

153. “The great thing about the dead, they make space.”

— John Updike

154. “Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably – he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words – misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.”

— John Updike

155. “The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.”

— John Updike

156. “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

157. “Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.”

— John Updike

158. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

— John Updike

159. “The reel of your real life unwound only once.”

— John Updike

160. “Love makes the air light.”

— John Updike

161. “You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”

— John Updike

162. “So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”

— John Updike

163. “All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.”

— John Updike

164. “He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.”

— John Updike

165. “Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.”

— John Updike

166. “Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”

— John Updike

167. “Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it.”

— John Updike

Featured in: Country Quotes

168. “The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today’s pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.”

— John Updike

169. “Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.”

— John Updike

170. “How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”

— John Updike

171. “The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.”

— John Updike

172. “One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

— John Updike

173. “Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.”

— John Updike

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

174. “Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.”

— John Updike

175. “At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.”

— John Updike

176. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

177. “There’s a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can’t.”

— John Updike

178. “All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.”

— John Updike

179. “Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”

— John Updike

180. “Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.”

— John Updike

181. “There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.”

— John Updike

182. “An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.”

— John Updike

183. “Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.”

— John Updike

184. “I would especially like to re-court 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

185. “The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.”

— John Updike

186. “Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.”

— John Updike

187. “Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.”

— John Updike

Featured in: Country Quotes

188. “A writer’s self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.”

— John Updike

189. “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.”

— John Updike

190. “Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You’re on the edge of normality.”

— John Updike

191. “There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he’s suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head.”

— John Updike

192. “Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

— John Updike

193. “We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe.”

— John Updike

194. “That’s why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God.”

— John Updike

195. “In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.”

— John Updike

196. “He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door.”

— John Updike

197. “What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do. What you have done you’ll do lots more.”

— John Updike

198. “Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other’s way, what a tangle.”

— John Updike

199. “That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

— John Updike

200. “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