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?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
- Wendell Berry American Author, Environmentalist
- Ernest J. Gaines American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Ralph Ellison American Novelist
- John Irving American Novelist
- Don DeLillo American Author
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