John Updike Quotes

“I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.”

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

“My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.”

“I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.”

“I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.”

“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.”

“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.”

“Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.”

“Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.”

“Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'”

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.”

“Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.”

“The rich - they just live in another realm, really.”

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”

“You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.”

“Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.”

“Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.”

“Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.”

“The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.”

“What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.”

“...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.”

“Nature refuses to rest.”

“In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.”

“What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.”