Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

256. “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

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

— John Updike

258. “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

259. “Which witch is which?”

— John Updike

260. “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

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

— John Updike

262. “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

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

— John Updike

264. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

274. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

277. “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

278. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

281. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

284. “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

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

— John Updike

286. “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

287. “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

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

— John Updike

289. “The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

293. “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

294. “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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

297. “Weeds don’t know they’re weeds.”

— John Updike

298. “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

299. “Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike