John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

— John Updike

...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

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

— John Updike

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

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

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

— John Updike

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.

— John Updike

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

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

He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

— John Updike

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.

— 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 hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

— John Updike

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

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

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

— John Updike

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

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

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

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

— John Updike

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

— John Updike

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

— 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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.

— 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

I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

— John Updike

Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.

— John Updike

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

— John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

— 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

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

— John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

— John Updike

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

— John Updike

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

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

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

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

The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.

— John Updike

Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

— John Updike

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

All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.

— John Updike

Like water, blood must run or grow scum.

— John Updike

Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

— John Updike

There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

— John Updike

Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.

— John Updike

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

— 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

Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.

— John Updike

This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.

— John Updike

Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.

— John Updike

When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

— John Updike

Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

— John Updike

...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.

— John Updike

...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.

— John Updike

I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?

— John Updike

...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

— John Updike

You don't know what you don't know.

— John Updike

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

— John Updike

He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.

— John Updike

[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

— John Updike

Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.

— John Updike

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

— John Updike

[Re Florida] Just not being senile is considered great down here.

— John Updike

[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.

— John Updike

Humor is my default mode.

— John Updike

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

— John Updike

When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.

— John Updike

She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...

— John Updike

When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.

— John Updike

The papers exaggerate. They exaggerate everything, just to sell papers. The government exaggerates, to keep our minds off what morons they are.

— John Updike

[Nelson] "...I get none of the things a man's supposed to get from a wife."

— John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

— John Updike

[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.

— John Updike

His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.

— John Updike

He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.

— John Updike

[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

— John Updike

[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled."

— John Updike

[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.

— John Updike

[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."

— John Updike

[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."

— John Updike

[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."

— John Updike

You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.

— John Updike

He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

— John Updike

...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

— John Updike

Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.

— John Updike

Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."

— John Updike

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

— John Updike

[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."

— John Updike

Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, waiting to have their fun in the afterlife. The thing about the afterlife, it kept this life within bounds somehow, like the Russians. Now there's just Japan, and technology, and the profit motive, and getting all you can while you can.

— John Updike

..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

— John Updike

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

— John Updike

Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.

— John Updike

...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.

— John Updike

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

— John Updike

[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.

— John Updike

...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

— 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

[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

— John Updike

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.

— John Updike

We are most alive when we're in love.

— John Updike

Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.

— John Updike

Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.

— John Updike

[Pru] "...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal."

— John Updike

[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

— John Updike

Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.

— John Updike

A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

— John Updike

In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.

— John Updike

Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.

— John Updike

"...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.

— John Updike

[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

— John Updike

Things change," says Mr Shimada. "Is world's sad secret.

— John Updike

[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "...You're in real trouble."

— John Updike

[Harry having drawn at golf] The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?

— John Updike

[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."

— John Updike

...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.

— John Updike

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

— John Updike

[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.

— John Updike

...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.

— John Updike

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

— John Updike

Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.

— John Updike

There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

— John Updike

Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.

— John Updike

[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.

— John Updike

God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.

— John Updike

But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.

— John Updike

There's more to being a human being than having your own way.

— John Updike

This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.

— John Updike

Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"

— John Updike

He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?

— John Updike

One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.

— John Updike

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

— John Updike

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

— John Updike

[coming away from the doctor's after a check-up] Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.

— John Updike

Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.

— John Updike

[Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.

— John Updike

Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.

— John Updike

Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.

— John Updike

[Ronnie to Nelson] "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games."

— John Updike

[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love."

— John Updike

His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain.

— John Updike

These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.

— John Updike

Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.

— John Updike

[Re Annabelle] ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.

— John Updike

[Annabelle] "...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."

— John Updike

[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."

— John Updike

If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.

— John Updike

Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies.

— John Updike

Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

— John Updike

[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39] "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem..."

— John Updike

[Mim to Nelson] "Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid."

— John Updike

[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend."

— John Updike

Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.

— John Updike

[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..."

— John Updike

[Nelson] "...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

— John Updike

All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.

— John Updike

Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.

— John Updike

...they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

— John Updike

[Nelson, re watching TV] He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials...

— John Updike

Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?

— 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

The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.

— John Updike

It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

— John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

— John Updike

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

— John Updike

One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

— John Updike

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?

— John Updike

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

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

— 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

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

— John Updike

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

— John Updike

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

— John Updike

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

— John Updike

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

— John Updike

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

— John Updike

In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.

— John Updike

An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?

— John Updike

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

— 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

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

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

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

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

At last, small witches, goblins, hags,Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.

— 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

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

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

— John Updike

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

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

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

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

— John Updike

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

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

— 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

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

— John Updike

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

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

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

— John Updike