Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”

— John Updike

152. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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

— John Updike

159. “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

160. “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

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

— John Updike

162. “Love makes the air light.”

— John Updike

163. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

168. “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

169. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”

— John Updike

170. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

174. “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

175. “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

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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

187. “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

188. “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

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

— John Updike

190. “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

191. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

194. “Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.”

— John Updike

195. “There are some women that don’t do it for some men. That’s why they turn out so many models.”

— John Updike

196. “The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.”

— John Updike

197. “Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots – places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

199. “The muttered hint, “Remember, you have a stroke here,” freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike