Quotes By John Updike
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
John Updike
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
John Updike
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
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 blank paper.
John Updike
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike