John Updike Quotes

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

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

“Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.”

“It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.”

“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.”

“The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.”

“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.”

“I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.”

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

“Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.”

“Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.”

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

“Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.”

“Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.”

“For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.”

“Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.”

“Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.”

“Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.”

“The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.”

“I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page”

“My father taught only math.”

“There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.”

“My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.”

“Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.”

“The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.”