John Updike Quotes

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.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

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

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.

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.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

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.

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

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

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

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

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

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

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

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

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.