Top 488 Quotes & Sayings by John Updike
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist John Updike.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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.
I don't think women are dumb.
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.
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.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
We are most alive when we're in love.
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.
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.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
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.
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
All love comes from the family.
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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.
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
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.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
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.
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Humor is my default mode.
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.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
My father taught only math.
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Gods don't answer letters.
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.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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.
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.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
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.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
I have never liked haircuts.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
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.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
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.
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
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