John Updike Quotes

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

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

“I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.”

“There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.”

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”

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

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

“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.”

“irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.”

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

“My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.”

“I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.”

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

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

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

“You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.”

“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.”

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

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

“My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.”

“Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.”

“The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.”

“All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.”

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

“Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.”

“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.”

“Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.”

“Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.”

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

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

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

“If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.”

“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.”

“If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.”

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

“The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.”

“Humor is my default mode.”

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

“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.”

“There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.”

“All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.”

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

“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.”

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.”