Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Which witch is which?”

— John Updike

252. “Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

— John Updike

253. “It’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.”

— John Updike

254. “Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.”

— John Updike

255. “We love too late... Oh why, why may we never join hand to hand, or give back speech truly?”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

258. “Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.”

— John Updike

259. “Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”

— John Updike

260. “Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”

— John Updike

261. “The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.”

— John Updike

262. “The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”

— John Updike

263. “We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

— John Updike

264. “History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that’s when empires start to decline.”

— John Updike

265. “The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.”

— John Updike

266. “And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?”

— John Updike

267. “Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God’s specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.”

— John Updike

268. “The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.”

— John Updike

269. “Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.”

— John Updike

270. “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

— John Updike

271. “Mozart’s music gives us permission to live.”

— John Updike

272. “Our lives fade behind us before we die.”

— John Updike

273. “We all rather live under wraps, don’t we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn’t it?”

— John Updike

274. “To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.”

— John Updike

275. “So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer’s career and that we shouldn’t worry about what we’re not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.”

— John Updike

276. “Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

— John Updike

277. “Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.”

— John Updike

278. “Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games.”

— John Updike

279. “In no other sport must the spectator move.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

281. “Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.”

— John Updike

282. “Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He.”

— John Updike

283. “We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!”

— John Updike

284. “Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”

— John Updike

285. “It’s great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.”

— John Updike

286. “You cannot but learn more of the world’s heft, as you take it now into your hands.”

— John Updike

287. “Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.”

— John Updike

288. “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

289. “Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.”

— John Updike

290. “Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.”

— John Updike

291. “Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I’m still trying to educate myself. I don’t think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can’t do.”

— John Updike

292. “How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?”

— John Updike

293. “Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.”

— John Updike

294. “Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.”

— John Updike

295. “Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.”

— John Updike

296. “One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.”

— John Updike

297. “To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.”

— John Updike

298. “Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child.”

— John Updike

299. “All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.”

— John Updike

300. “But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

— John Updike