Welcome to a collection of insightful and captivating quotes by one of America’s most celebrated literary figures, John Updike. Renowned for his eloquent prose and keen observations of human nature, Updike’s words resonate with readers across generations, offering profound insights into life, love, and the complexities of the human condition.
John Updike, born in 1932, was a prolific novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic whose works have left an indelible mark on the landscape of American literature. Throughout his career, Updike garnered numerous accolades, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, for his novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. His writing delves into the intricacies of suburban life, the nuances of relationships, and the existential questions that define the human experience.
Within these pages, you’ll find a selection of John Updike’s most memorable quotes, encapsulating his wit, wisdom, and unparalleled storytelling prowess. Whether you seek inspiration, contemplation, or simply a glimpse into the mind of a literary luminary, Updike’s words are sure to leave a lasting impression. Dive into the world of John Updike and explore the richness of his literary legacy.
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
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. John Updike
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures – if not happiness – its hopeful pursuit. John Updike
The Internet doesn’t like you to learn too much about explosives. John Updike
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. John Updike
Writing makes you more human. John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. John Updike
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. John Updike
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. John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. John Updike
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. John Updike
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. John Updike
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. John Updike
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. John Updike
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space – only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. John Updike
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. John Updike
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. John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. John Updike
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. John Updike
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. John Updike
We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings… Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. John Updike
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. John Updike
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. John Updike
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. John Updike
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. John Updike
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. John Updike
There’s a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can’t. John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. John Updike
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. John Updike
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It’s because they’re so fascinating and exasperating, so other. John Updike
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. John Updike
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. John Updike
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. John Updike
Sex is like money; only too much is enough. John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. John Updike
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. John Updike
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. John Updike
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. John Updike
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. John Updike
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. John Updike
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. John Updike
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. John Updike
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
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
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. John Updike
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. John Updike
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. John Updike
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. John Updike
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with ‘The Waste Land,’ I opened their copy of ‘Ulysses.’ The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. John Updike
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. John Updike
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don’t think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I’m saying. John Updike
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. John Updike
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. John Updike
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. John Updike
We are most alive when we’re in love. John Updike
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. John Updike
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. John Updike
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. John Updike
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. John Updike
I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen. John Updike
Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. John Updike
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. John Updike
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. John Updike
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. John Updike
It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter’s hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. John Updike
A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. John Updike
Gods don’t answer letters. John Updike
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. John Updike
Belief, like love, must be voluntary. John Updike
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience. John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. John Updike
I think books should have secrets, like people do. John Updike
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. John Updike
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. John Updike
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
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. John Updike
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of ‘The Centaur’ and ‘Of the Farm’; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. John Updike
We don’t really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. John Updike
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. John Updike
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. John Updike
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there’s this panicky feeling that ‘This is me and I must make it better.’ John Updike
The theme of old age doesn’t seem to fascinate Hollywood. John Updike
Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer’s eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. John Updike
I find in my own writing that only fiction – and rarely, a poem – fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. John Updike
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn’t have a private income. I had no other profession. John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. John Updike
