The Best John Updike quotes

We are most alive when We’re in love. — John Updike

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. — John Updike

I love my government not least for the extent to whIch It leaves me alone. — John Updike

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. — John Updike

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. — John Updike

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever. — John Updike

It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast. — John Updike

The yearning for an afterlife is The opposite of selfish it is love and praise for The world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. — John Updike

Love makes the air light. — John Updike

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. — John Updike

Sex is like money; only too much is enough. — John Updike

I don’t think women are dumb. — John Updike

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter. — John Updike

Women are an alien race set down among us. — 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

It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. — John Updike

There are some women that don’t do it for some men. That’s why they turn out so many models. — John Updike

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us. — John Updike

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It’s because they’re so fascinating and exasperating, so other. — John Updike

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

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

Oh,’ she says, ‘the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It’s a woman who changed her mind afterward. — John Updike

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it. — John Updike

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything — John Updike

The artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. — John Updike

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world… — John Updike

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. — John Updike

The fucking world is running out of gas. — John Updike

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. — John Updike

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

Fraud makes the world go round. — John Updike

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 God. — John Updike

How can you respect the world when you see it’s being run by a bunch of kids turned old? — John Updike

Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace. — John Updike

Nature may be defined as that which exists without guilt. — John Updike

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self–solicitude is the enemy of well–being. — John Updike

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

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. — John Updike

Human was the music, natural was the static. — John Updike

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. — John Updike

Looking foolish does the spirit good. — John Updike

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. — John Updike

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. — John Updike

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 selves. — John Updike

What art offers is space–a certain breathing room for the spirit. — John Updike

Whatever men make,’ she says, ‘what they felt when they made it is there…Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. — John Updike

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats. — John Updike

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots–places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. — John Updike

Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times. — 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

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature. — John Updike

That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded. — John Updike

I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it. — John Updike

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. — John Updike

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it. — John Updike

He doesn’t blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting. — John Updike

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. — John Updike

No act is so private it does not seek applause. — John Updike

There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. — John Updike

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — John Updike

I really don’t want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. — John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. — John Updike

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You’re on the edge of normality. — John Updike

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. — John Updike

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. — John Updike

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record. — John Updike

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. — John Updike

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. — John Updike

The–writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer. — John Updike

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

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even–handed pairing, of pictures and words. — John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. — John Updike

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

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time. — John Updike

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? — John Updike

Figure out where you’re going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. — John Updike

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 and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time. — John Updike

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. — John Updike

I would especially like to re–court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. — John Updike

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? — John Updike

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? — John Updike

The great thing about the dead, they make space. — John Updike