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John Updike
218 quotes
“The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On London, in “A Madman”, The New Yorker (22 December 1962)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Foreword for Younger Readers”, Assorted Prose (1965)
“One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Confessions of a Wild Bore”, Assorted Prose (1965)
“At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags, Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1965 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: October, A Child's Calendar (1965)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On J. D. Salinger, from a review of his Franny and Zooey, in Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231;…
“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On completing a long novel, New York Times (7 April 1968)
“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1975 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Month of Sundays (1975)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in George Plimpton ed Writers at Work' Viking (1976)
“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Yorker (March 29, 1976)
“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.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Marching through a Novel” in Tossing and Turning (1977)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in New York Times Book Review (April 10, 1977). later published in Conversations with John Updike (1994) edited by James Plath, p. 113
“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston, Massachusetts (January 30, 1978)
“I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston (January 30, 1978)
“He shows the magisterial ability to keep talking, however busily he appears engaged in conjuring up a world, about himself.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Of Knut Hamsun, in "Books: Saddles with the World", The New Yorker (October 23, 1978), p. 182
“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How to Love America and Leave it at the Same Time,” Problems and Other Stories (1979)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Too Far To Go, foreword (1979)
“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Christian Science Monitor (5 March 1979)
“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: London Observer (25 March 1979)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: They Thought They Were Better" in TIME magazine (21 July 1980)
“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)
“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal, New York Times (26 August 1981)
“...golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay The Bliss of Golf (1982), reprinted in Golf Dreams (1996)
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword to Hugging the Shore (1983)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Bankrupt Man", Hugging the Shore (1983)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)
“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)
“Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem (1984), New Yorker (23 July 1984)
“He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Franz Kafka, quoted in report on Great Books discussion groups, New York Times (28 February 1985)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On T. S. Eliot (1984) by Peter Ackroyd, in which the Eliot estate forbade quotation from Eliot’s books and letters, The New Yorker (25 March 1985)
“He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On T S Matthews, and his biography of T. S. Eliot, Great Tom (1974), in The New Yorker (25 March 1985)
“I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On a child doing homework near the family’s television set, in Roger’s Version (1986)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in “When Writers Turn to Brave New Forms” by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (24 March 1986)
“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)
“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 (1932–2009) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Life Magazine (September 1986)
“It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1987 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in London Observer (30 August 1987)
“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)
“For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)
“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Yorker (30 July 1990)
“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Yorker (November 1992)
“Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
“Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe,” Physics Today (April 2005)
“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.”
John Updike (1932–2009) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Book Expo America Saturday Book & Author Breakfast (26 May 2006)
“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
John Updike (1932–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source