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John Updike Quotes | Quotes said by John Updike

  • John Updike Quote #1

    [I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

  • John Updike Quote #2

    …he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

  • John Updike Quote #3

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

  • John Updike Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

  • John Updike Quote #6

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

  • John Updike Quote #7

    And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

  • John Updike Quote #8

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

  • John Updike Quote #9

    As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.

  • John Updike Quote #10

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

  • John Updike Quote #11

    Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

  • John Updike Quote #12

    But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

  • John Updike Quote #13

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

  • John Updike Quote #14

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

  • John Updike Quote #15

    Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

  • John Updike Quote #16

    Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

  • John Updike Quote #17

    Dabbling in the sandbox gives Rabbit a small headache. Over at the pavilion the rubber thump of Roofball and the click of checkers call to his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistlechains out of and of glue and of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with children's murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

  • John Updike Quote #18

    Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot.

  • John Updike Quote #19

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

  • John Updike Quote #20

    Driving is boring, Rabbit pontificates, but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

  • John Updike Quote #21

    Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

  • John Updike Quote #22

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

  • John Updike Quote #23

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

  • John Updike Quote #24

    From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

  • John Updike Quote #25

    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.

  • John Updike Quote #26

    Growth is betrayal.

  • John Updike Quote #27

    Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

  • John Updike Quote #28

    He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

  • John Updike Quote #29

    He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.

  • John Updike Quote #30

    Humor is my default mode.

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