John Updike Quotes

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

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

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

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

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 ages: Let us walk through the door.

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

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

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

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.

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.

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

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.

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.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

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

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

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.

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, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

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

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

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

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.

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

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

Human was the music, natural was the static.

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.