John Updike Quotes - Page 11

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I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

John Updike

Country, Athlete, Trying

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

John Updike

Mean, Men, Spirit

John Updike (2010). “Rabbit Redux”, p.167, Random House

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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

Work, Trying, Panic

John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

John Updike

Movie, Inspiring, Safe

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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

John Updike

Funny, Sex, War

Self-Consciousness ch. 4 (1989)

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It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

John Updike

Men, Stories, Littles

John Updike (1981). “Rabbit is Rich: Rabbit Redux ; Rabbit, Run”

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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.

John Updike

Religious, Giving Up, Philosophical

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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.

John Updike

New York, Book, Cutting

John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.216, Random House

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

John Updike

Mother, Women, World

John Updike (1963). “The Centaur”, Ballantine Books

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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.

John Updike

Life, Self, Years

John Updike (2012). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, p.3, Random House

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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

John Updike

Movie, Views, Imagine

John Updike (2012). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, p.39, Random House

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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

Light, Self, Essentials

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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

John Updike

Passion, Government, Essence

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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

Spring, Flower, Farewell

John Updike, Nancy Ekholm Burkert (1989). “A Child's Calendar”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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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.

John Updike

Cutting, Boys, Hair

John Updike (2012). “Tossing and Turning”, p.53, Knopf

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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

John Updike

Song, Lacking

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My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

John Updike

Father, Fall, Clothes

John Updike (1963). “The Centaur”, Ballantine Books

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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.

John Updike

Running, Animal, Cracks

John Updike (2010). “Rabbit at Rest”, p.213, Random House

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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

John Updike

Ambiguity, Clash, Extremes

John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.11, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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.

John Updike

Self, Creative, Use

"Writers on Themselves: Magic, Working Secrets" by John Updike, www.nytimes.com. August 17, 1986.

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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

John Updike

Reality, Self, Guarantees That

John Updike (1989). “Self-consciousness: memoirs”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

John Updike

Sea, Cities, People

John Updike (1987). “More stately mansions: a story”, Nouveau Press

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

John Updike

Betrayal, Loss, Sacrifice

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You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

John Updike

Wisdom, Father, Ideas

John Updike (2010). “Rabbit, Run”, p.129, Random House

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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.

John Updike

Rainbow, Trying, Christianity

John Updike (2011). “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf”, p.73, Random House

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Latest quotes from interviews

"We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq."

- John Updike,

www.today.com, added Oct 15, 2017

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John Updike

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Born: March 18, 1932
Died: January 27, 2009
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

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