John Updike Quotes

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

A few places are especially conducive to inspiration - automobiles, church - public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church - little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday.

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

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 from more and more.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

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

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

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

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

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 the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

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.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

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 into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

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.