John Updike > Quotes

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”
― John Updike, A Month Of Sundays

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ”
― John Updike

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
― John Updike

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― John Updike

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
― John Updike

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
― John Updike

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”
― John Updike, A&P: Lust in the Aisles

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

[Rabbit Angstrok]”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“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.”
― John Updike

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”
― John Updike

“We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living. ”
― John Updike, Brazil: A Novel

“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”
― John Updike

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“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

“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.”
― John Updike

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. ”
― John Updike

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

“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”
― John Updike

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”
― John Updike

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone”
― John Updike

“Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”
― John Updike

“Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.”
― 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

“...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“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

“To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives. ”
― John Updike

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”
― John Updike

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”
― John Updike, Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.”
― John Updike, A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.”
― John Updike

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”
― John Updike

“History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.”
― John Updike

“If you just have the guts to be yourself, other people’ll pay your price.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”
― John Updike

“The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.”
― John Updike

“Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.”
― John Updike

“Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”
― John Updike