Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

204. “Looking foolish does the spirit good.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

208. “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

209. “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

210. “What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

219. “I’m somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don’t like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.”

— John Updike

220. “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

221. “Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible.”

— John Updike

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— John Updike

231. “Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.”

— John Updike

232. “They found themselves involved willy-nilly in a futile but urgent search for the truth.”

— John Updike

233. “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

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

— John Updike

235. “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

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

— John Updike

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.”

— John Updike

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— John Updike