Life Quotes by John Updike

Without rain, there would be no life.

— John Updike

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

— John Updike

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

— John Updike

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

— John Updike

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of…

— John Updike

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

— John Updike

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

— John Updike

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

— John Updike

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

— John Updike

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and…

— John Updike

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her…

— John Updike

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.…

— John Updike

“To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my…

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments…

— John Updike

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life…

— John Updike

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and…

— John Updike

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call…

— John Updike

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from…

— John Updike

“I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in…

— John Updike

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the…

— John Updike

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics…

— John Updike

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that…

— John Updike

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks…

— John Updike

“The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness…

— John Updike

From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way…

— John Updike

“Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies…

— John Updike

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will…

— John Updike

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start…

— John Updike

“Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.”

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

— John Updike

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

— John Updike