"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "
— John Updike

"What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit."
— John Updike

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."
— John Updike (A Month of Sundays)

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."
— John Updike

"You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"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)

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

"We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one."
— John Updike

"Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
— 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

"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

"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)

"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

"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

"Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation."
— John Updike

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.""
— John Updike (The Widows of Eastwick)

"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

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone`"
— 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)

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"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)

""Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom's son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy's chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him...Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have - Pilly -" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum."
— 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

"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

"There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head."
— John Updike (Rabbit Is Rich)

"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)

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
"
— John Updike

"First snow: it came this year late in November."
— John Updike (Toward the End of Time)

"Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält."
— John Updike (Terrorist)

"Vorsichtshalber haben sie das Etikett 'Kapitalismus' ersetzt durch solche, auf denen 'freie Marktwirtschaft' und 'Konsumkultur' steht, nur roch das immer noch zu sehr nach Hund-frisst-Hund, nach allzu vielen Verlierern und maßlos abrahmenden Gewinnern. Wenn man die Hunde aber isch nicht miteinander balgen lässt, dann liegen sie den ganzen Tag im Zwinger und pennen. Im Grund besteht das Problem darin, dass die Gesellschaft anständig zu sein versucht, und mit Anstand ist gegen die menschliche Natur nichts auszurichten. Nicht das Geringste. Wir sollten alle wieder Jäger und Sammler werden, dann hätten wir eine hundertprozentige Beschäftigungsquote und ein gesundes Magenknurren."
— John Updike (Terrorist)

"'Also ist mein Sohn ein Simpel.'
'In einer Hinsicht. Aber der größte Teil der Menschheit ist so. Weil es sonst zu schwer zu ertragen ist, Mensch zu sein. Im Gegensatz zu den Tieren wissen wir zu viel. Sie, die anderen Tiere, wissen gerade genug, um ihren Job zu machen und zu sterben. Um zu essen, zu schlafen, zu vögeln, Babys zu kriegen und zu sterben.'"
— John Updike (Terrorist)

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

"Wir wissen eben nicht, was einer tun sollte, wir haben nicht mehr wir früher Antworten parat; wir wursteln uns bloß weiter durch und versuchen, nicht nachzudenken."
— John Updike (Terrorist)

"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

"When I was in power, I found that experts can’t be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,---people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid."
— John Updike (The Coup)

"Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. "
— John Updike

"Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face."
— 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)

"...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

"...I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened."
— John Updike (The Centaur)

"A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers."
— John Updike (Rabbit, Run)

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