John Updike Quotes

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

Fraud makes the world go round.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

Love makes the air light.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

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