John Updike Quotes

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.”

“Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.”

“Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.”

“It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.”

“I don't think women are dumb.”

“The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.”

“I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.”

“Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.”

“"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.”

“Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.”

“I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.”

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

“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.”

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“Human was the music, natural was the static.”

“We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.”

“One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.”

“The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.”

“New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.”

“The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.”

“Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.”