John Updike > Quotes

“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, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ”
― John Updike

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
― John Updike, Self-Consciousness

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

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”
― John Updike, A Month of Sundays

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

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

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”
― John Updike

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”
― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”
― John Updike

“We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.”
― John Updike, Brazil

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”
― 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

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”
― John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick

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

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”
― John Updike

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

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”
― John Updike, A&P: Lust in the Aisles

“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, Self-Consciousness

“I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”
― John Updike

“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.”
― John Updike

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. ”
― John Updike

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”
― John Updike, Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

“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.”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run