Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Updike (American Author)

John Updike (1932–2009,) fully John Hoyer Updike, was an American novelist, poet, and critic who published more than 60 books in his lifetime, including 28 novels. He is celebrated for his careful craftsmanship and realistic but subtle depiction of “American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class” life.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied at Harvard and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England (1954–55.) He then worked for The New Yorker (1955–57,) the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with the magazine to which he has contributed short stories, poems, and book reviews.

Updike’s status as one of the world’s foremost writers is mainly due to his fiction. His beat is the middle-class USA, his concerns those that dominated the 20th century: sex, marriage, adultery, divorce, religion, materialism. Among his best-known books are The Centaur (1963,) the Rabbit series—Rabbit, Run (1960,) Rabbit Redux (1971,) Rabbit is Rich (1981; Pulitzer,) Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer,) and the novella ‘Rabbit Remembered’ in Licks of Love (2000, chronicling the life of a car salesman,)—Couples (1968,) The Coup (1978) and The Witches of Eastwick (1984.)

Updike also wrote Roger’s Version (1986,) In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) and Terrorist (2006; about an Islamic extremist,) Self-Consciousness (1989; a memoir,) and Collected Poems 1953–93 (1993.)

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by John Updike

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
John Updike
Topics: Facts

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.
John Updike
Topics: Fame

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
Topics: Critics, Art, Criticism

I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. 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
Topics: Taste, Style

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
Topics: Sanity

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You’re on the edge of normality.
John Updike
Topics: Fame

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

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike
Topics: Grace, Water, Weather, Rain

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

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
Topics: Debt

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

We are most alive when we’re in love
John Updike
Topics: Romance

In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
John Updike
Topics: Memory, Memories

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike

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

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
John Updike
Topics: Procrastination

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.
John Updike
Topics: Weight, Patience, Boredom, Bores

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
John Updike
Topics: Perfection, Perfectionism

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
Topics: Age

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

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.
John Updike
Topics: Leaders, Leadership

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike
Topics: Children

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
Topics: Custom

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
Topics: Consumerism

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
Topics: Authors & Writing

Inhabiting a male body is like having a bank account; as long as it’s healthy, you don’t think much about it.
John Updike

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

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

You always find things you didn’t know you were going to say, and that is the adventure of writing.
John Updike
Topics: Writing

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

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