All John Updike Quotes
- My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due. Beautiful
- Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song. Another Song
- 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,… Beautiful
- 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,… Average
- Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Eager
- 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. Big
- When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW… Apish
- In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted… Billboards
- It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from… Blade
- What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid… All
- I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good… All
- Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. Attainability
- Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much. Affair
- The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy… Alone
- Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. Cart
- I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish. Cent
- Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right… Animal
- All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed. All
- Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can… Air
- We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. All
- As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a… Accessible
- Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Imagine
- The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential… Crowd
- New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. Cities
- The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought,… Concern