110+ John Updike Quotes On Realistic, Refined And Witty

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. He is widely known for his novels Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit Is Rich, which focus on the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Updike's work is characterized by its attention to detail, its use of allusion, and its exploration of themes such as alienation, loneliness, and death. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Updike on love, realistic, refined.

Top 10 John Updike Quotes

1. Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
2. Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
3. Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
4. Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
8. Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
9. 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.
10. So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

John Updike Short Quotes

• Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
• Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
• I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
• Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
• Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
• Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
• If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
• Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
• The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.
• We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike Quotes About Love

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

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull. — John Updike

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

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. — 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

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

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

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

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes About Life

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. — John Updike

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. — John Updike

Without rain, there would be no life. — John Updike

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. — John Updike

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. — John Updike

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. — John Updike

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world. — 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 heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life. — John Updike

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

John Updike Quotes About Writer

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

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. — John Updike

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

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician. — 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

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. — John Updike

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know. — 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

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

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. — John Updike

John Updike Quotes About World

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

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

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

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

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

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind. — John Updike

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

Fraud makes the world go round. — John Updike

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands. — John Updike

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

John Updike Quotes About Permits

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. — John Updike

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. — John Updike

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? — John Updike

John Updike Quotes About Blind

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. — John Updike

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence. — John Updike

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 overanimation. One can either see or be seen. — John Updike

John Updike Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — John Updike

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

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. — John Updike

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. — John Updike

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

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. — John Updike

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

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. — John Updike

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

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

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

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. — John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. — John Updike

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader. — John Updike

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. — John Updike

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. — 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

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. — John Updike

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it. — John Updike

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze. — John Updike

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. — John Updike

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

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. — John Updike

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store. — 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

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go. — John Updike

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. — John Updike

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. — John Updike

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. — John Updike

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. — John Updike

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you. — John Updike

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us. — John Updike

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

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

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. — John Updike

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

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. — John Updike

At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins. — John Updike

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. — John Updike

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. — John Updike

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys — John Updike

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing. — John Updike

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving. — John Updike

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

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. — John Updike

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist. — John Updike

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. — John Updike

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. — John Updike

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. — John Updike

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

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. — John Updike

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. — John Updike

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. — John Updike

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

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide. — John Updike

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? — John Updike

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. — John Updike

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. — John Updike

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due. — John Updike

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader. — John Updike

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. — John Updike

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

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown. — John Updike

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

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

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. — John Updike

Life Lessons by John Updike

1. John Updike emphasizes the importance of living a life of passion and purpose, and encourages readers to remain true to themselves and their beliefs.
2. He also stresses the importance of understanding and accepting the consequences of our actions, and of learning from our mistakes.
3. Lastly, Updike encourages us to appreciate the beauty of the world around us, and to take joy in the small things that life has to offer.