John Updike Quotes

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

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

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

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

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

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

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

Writing makes you more human.

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty 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.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

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.

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

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.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

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.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

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

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

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.

All blessings are mixed blessings.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

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

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

The days are short,The sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and dark.

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.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?