John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip…

— John Updike

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers…

— John Updike

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

— John Updike

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.

— John Updike

“The fucking world is running out of gas.”

— John Updike

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

— John Updike

“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images…

— John Updike

“it was somehow wonderful of her to be, in every detail, herself.”

— John Updike

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and…

— John Updike

“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins…

— John Updike

Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature…

— John Updike

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

— John Updike

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

— John Updike

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

— John Updike

“When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads…But when…

— John Updike

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

— John Updike

The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian…

— John Updike

“Sleep this night is not a dark haunted domain the mind must consciously set itself to invade, but a cave inside himself,…

— John Updike

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch,…

— John Updike

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable…

— John Updike

“There was a time—the year after leaving, even five years after when this homely street, with its old-fashioned high crown, its sidewalk…

— John Updike