Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The muttered hint, “Remember, you have a stroke here,” freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.”

— John Updike

202. “Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess’s cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that’s used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.”

— John Updike

203. “A few places are especially conducive to inspiration – automobiles, church – public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church – little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday.”

— John Updike

204. “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

205. “I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

207. “Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

— John Updike

208. “Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.”

— John Updike

209. “Television was soon to eclipse print’s inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch.”

— John Updike

210. “I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.”

— John Updike

211. “I’m always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I’m stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.”

— John Updike

212. “Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.”

— John Updike

213. “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

214. “There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving...”

— John Updike

215. “We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.”

— John Updike

216. “She breathed that air he’d forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.”

— John Updike

217. “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

218. “He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes.”

— John Updike

219. “We shed skins in life, to keep living.”

— John Updike

220. “Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.”

— John Updike

221. “Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”

— John Updike

222. “What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I’m too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.”

— John Updike

223. “I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

225. “No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

— John Updike

226. “Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.”

— John Updike

227. “Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.”

— John Updike

228. “The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they’ve really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.”

— John Updike

229. “Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.”

— John Updike

230. “Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

— John Updike

231. “As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.”

— John Updike

232. “The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything – dead meat, living meat, old bones –.”

— John Updike

233. “As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit’s own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.”

— John Updike

234. “Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.”

— John Updike

235. “Looking foolish does the spirit good.”

— John Updike

236. “My mother didn’t raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.”

— John Updike

237. “The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.”

— John Updike

238. “The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.”

— John Updike

239. “Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor.”

— John Updike

240. “Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

— John Updike

241. “The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.”

— John Updike

242. “I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.”

— John Updike

243. “Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back.”

— John Updike

244. “Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

— John Updike

245. “Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.”

— John Updike

246. “I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”

— John Updike

247. “I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it.”

— John Updike

248. “Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It’s not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.”

— John Updike

249. “There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.”

— John Updike

250. “The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn’t had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen’s sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite’s innocent gusto. Candy.”

— John Updike