John Updike quote: "Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death."

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of t...
JOHN UPDIKE

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Gree...
JOHN UPDIKE

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
JOHN UPDIKE

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek a...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...
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 K...
JOHN UPDIKE

My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most wr...
JOHN UPDIKE

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
JOHN UPDIKE

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
JOHN UPDIKE

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

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the peop...
JOHN UPDIKE

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless...
JOHN UPDIKE

Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to...
JOHN UPDIKE

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a wa...
JOHN UPDIKE

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, w...
JOHN UPDIKE

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
JOHN UPDIKE

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a...
JOHN UPDIKE

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
JOHN UPDIKE

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the...
JOHN UPDIKE

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
JOHN UPDIKE

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect l...
JOHN UPDIKE

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.
JOHN UPDIKE

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we a...
JOHN UPDIKE

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago,...
JOHN UPDIKE

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines...
JOHN UPDIKE

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
JOHN UPDIKE

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

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
JOHN UPDIKE

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who ...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

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

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

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

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- the...
JOHN UPDIKE

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual pos...
JOHN UPDIKE

The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic de...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we ar...
JOHN UPDIKE

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that w...
JOHN UPDIKE

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
JOHN UPDIKE

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When...
JOHN UPDIKE

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
JOHN UPDIKE

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

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

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinate...
JOHN UPDIKE

It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do...
JOHN UPDIKE

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, an...
JOHN UPDIKE

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged th...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can,...
JOHN UPDIKE

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
JOHN UPDIKE

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
JOHN UPDIKE

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
JOHN UPDIKE

We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE

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

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky wa...
JOHN UPDIKE

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
JOHN UPDIKE

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer c...
JOHN UPDIKE

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
JOHN UPDIKE

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. Afte...
JOHN UPDIKE

All love comes from the family.
JOHN UPDIKE

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoym...
JOHN UPDIKE

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull,...
JOHN UPDIKE

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
JOHN UPDIKE

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is free...
JOHN UPDIKE

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumpe...
JOHN UPDIKE

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is ...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and th...
JOHN UPDIKE

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is wh...
JOHN UPDIKE

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
JOHN UPDIKE

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter p...
JOHN UPDIKE

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
JOHN UPDIKE

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvis...
JOHN UPDIKE

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and s...
JOHN UPDIKE

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
JOHN UPDIKE

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
JOHN UPDIKE

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas br...
JOHN UPDIKE

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable...
JOHN UPDIKE

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview....
JOHN UPDIKE

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within th...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

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

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your s...
JOHN UPDIKE

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a...
JOHN UPDIKE

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the s...
JOHN UPDIKE

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by t...
JOHN UPDIKE

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy re...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
JOHN UPDIKE

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no s...
JOHN UPDIKE

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolifi...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied...
JOHN UPDIKE

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of ...
JOHN UPDIKE

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I did...
JOHN UPDIKE

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip nove...
JOHN UPDIKE

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what d...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
JOHN UPDIKE

We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE

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

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
JOHN UPDIKE

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty...
JOHN UPDIKE

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it ...
JOHN UPDIKE

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get fo...
JOHN UPDIKE

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
JOHN UPDIKE

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the n...
JOHN UPDIKE

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plu...
JOHN UPDIKE

He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous sy...
JOHN UPDIKE

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they ...
JOHN UPDIKE

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
JOHN UPDIKE

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
JOHN UPDIKE

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its descripti...
JOHN UPDIKE

In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none.
JOHN UPDIKE

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
JOHN UPDIKE

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a b...
JOHN UPDIKE

Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
JOHN UPDIKE

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-b...
JOHN UPDIKE

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are s...
JOHN UPDIKE

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which th...
JOHN UPDIKE

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'Th...
JOHN UPDIKE

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigora...
JOHN UPDIKE

I have never liked haircuts.
JOHN UPDIKE

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively mainta...
JOHN UPDIKE

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the en...
JOHN UPDIKE

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-cen...
JOHN UPDIKE

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his wor...
JOHN UPDIKE

Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until...
JOHN UPDIKE

Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to stee...
JOHN UPDIKE

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longe...
JOHN UPDIKE

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
JOHN UPDIKE

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

All sunshine without a little rain makes a desert.
JOHN UPDIKE

"Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant ...
JOHN UPDIKE

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or...
JOHN UPDIKE

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism
JOHN UPDIKE

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is ...
JOHN UPDIKE

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights...
JOHN UPDIKE

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour...
JOHN UPDIKE

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou...
JOHN UPDIKE

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
JOHN UPDIKE

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

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t...
JOHN UPDIKE

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating noti...
JOHN UPDIKE

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they ...
JOHN UPDIKE

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes...
JOHN UPDIKE

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and...
JOHN UPDIKE

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, becaus...
JOHN UPDIKE

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just start...
JOHN UPDIKE

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of r...
JOHN UPDIKE

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main mater...
JOHN UPDIKE

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...
JOHN UPDIKE

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more...
JOHN UPDIKE

Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ...
JOHN UPDIKE

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...
JOHN UPDIKE

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted h...
JOHN UPDIKE

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family t...
JOHN UPDIKE

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating ...
JOHN UPDIKE

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a d...
JOHN UPDIKE

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

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...
JOHN UPDIKE

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
JOHN UPDIKE

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like li...
JOHN UPDIKE

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over...
JOHN UPDIKE

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extincti...
JOHN UPDIKE

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic ...
JOHN UPDIKE

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside o...
JOHN UPDIKE

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although ...
JOHN UPDIKE

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
JOHN UPDIKE

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and uns...
JOHN UPDIKE

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red f...
JOHN UPDIKE

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
JOHN UPDIKE

I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.
JOHN UPDIKE

John Updike

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