Best 363 quotes of John Updike on MyQuotes

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

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

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

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

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

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

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

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

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

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.

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

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

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

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

A woman’s beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman’s body.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

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

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

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.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

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.

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.