John Updike quotes - page 2

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. (John Updike)
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. View quote
John Updike
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. View quote
John Updike
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. View quote
John Updike
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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)
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. View quote
John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. View quote
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. View quote
John Updike
We are most alive when we're in love. View quote
John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. View quote
John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. View quote
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
John Updike
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. (John Updike)
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. View quote
John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. View quote
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. View quote
John Updike
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. View quote
John Updike