All John Updike Quotes
- Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of… Another Day
- The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some… Adventure
- But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. Begin
- To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for… Ability
- 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… Any
- You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. Clue
- If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. Guts
- The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. Anywhere
- Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them. Cds
- Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Celebrity
- Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing… Art
- Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can… Bookstores
- Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier… Age
- Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists. Accidents
- The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. Artist
- 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… Burden
- We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death… Animal
- The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. Dumb
- People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just… Any
- It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits… Absurd
- Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath. Act
- I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. Book
- History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of… Decline
- How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? Bunch
- ...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes… Better