Top 110 John Updike Quotes

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

For a long time, I was under the impression that ‘Terry and the Pirates’ was the best comic strip in the United States.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures – if not happiness – its hopeful pursuit.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.

Gods don’t answer letters.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn’t want to know.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow – and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It’s because they’re so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space – only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

All love comes from the family.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring – an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

I don’t know; I think I’d be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

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

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

It’s so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

I picked up ‘On Moral Fiction’ in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn’t read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

I know more about what it’s like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I’m a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word ‘wisdom’ has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I’m a little wiser.

I’m a dull person.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

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.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

I’m trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

I’ve always tried to write about America. It’s very worth a writer’s effort.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

Most Americans haven’t had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

We are most alive when we’re in love.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

When I was born, my parents and my mother’s parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age – was, in a sense, me.

Nature refuses to rest.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

It’s sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin – glory, love, whatever.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

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

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

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

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

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.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

There’s something very reassuring… about the written record.

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

There’s almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

I like short stories.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he’d been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.