Top 380 John Updike Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— John Updike

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.”

— John Updike

307. “All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.”

— John Updike

308. “There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.”

— John Updike

309. “The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible – think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.”

— John Updike

310. “A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.”

— John Updike

311. “With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks.”

— John Updike

312. “I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

— John Updike

313. “There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.”

— John Updike

314. “Music affected him as women’s talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener.”

— John Updike

315. “He doesn’t blame people for many sin, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.”

— John Updike

316. “They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.”

— John Updike

317. “I can’t bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There’s something so dead about a finished painting.”

— John Updike

318. “She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted...”

— John Updike

319. “There’s no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon’ll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put ’em there, 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

320. “You always find things you didn’t know you were going to say, and that is the adventure...”

— John Updike

321. “Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don’t know how they do it.”

— John Updike

322. “Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.”

— John Updike

323. “Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home – one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.”

— John Updike

324. “Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.”

— John Updike

325. “When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

— John Updike

326. “The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.”

— John Updike

327. “Was she asleep? He groped beside the bed, among his underclothes, for his wristwatch. He would soon learn, in undressing, to leave it lying discreetly visible. Its silent gold-rimmed face, a tiny banker’s face, stated that he had already been out to lunch an hour and forty minutes. A sour burning began to revolve in his stomach.”

— John Updike

328. “Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.”

— John Updike

329. “Though old himself, he disliked old men.”

— John Updike

330. “As the six, in file, passed into the poorhouse proper they clicked off glances of disdain with industrial precision.”

— John Updike

331. “From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

— John Updike

332. “The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened.”

— John Updike

333. “We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. into the nether world.”

— John Updike

334. “The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow.”

— John Updike

335. “Don’t you see, if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.”

— John Updike

336. “It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.”

— John Updike

337. “In her rare moods of liberation she held for him the danger that she would disclose great riches within herself, showing him the depths of loss frozen over by their marriage.”

— John Updike

338. “He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.”

— John Updike

339. “It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.”

— John Updike

340. “I really don’t want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.”

— John Updike

341. “His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.”

— John Updike

342. “Figure out where you’re going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.”

— John Updike

343. “Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.”

— John Updike

344. “One of the cool, chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.”

— John Updike

345. “By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

— John Updike

346. “Who’ll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.”

— John Updike

347. “Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents’ swift death Piet had no margin. He lived tight against his skin, and his flattish face wore a look of tension. Also, his European sense of order insisted that he place his children in Christendom.”

— John Updike

348. “His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.”

— John Updike

349. “You are all of twenty and very much feeling your womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on – the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just slightly disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It’s rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won’t quite catch fire, isn’t it?”

— John Updike

350. “I think books should have secrets, like people do.”

— John Updike