John Updike
215 quotes
Biography
"Humor is my default mode."
"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."
"American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism."
"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit."
"It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."
"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."
"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."
"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."
"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."
"Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey."
"<!-- I feared his visit. --> I was twenty-four, and the religious revival within myself was at its height. Earlier that summer, I had discovered Kierkegaard, and each week I brought back to the apartment one more of the Princeton University Press’s elegant and expensive editions of his works. They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator’s prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard’s own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. The demons with which he wrestled — Hegel and his avatars — were unknown to me, so Kierkegaard at his desk seemed to me to be writhing in the clutches of phantoms, slapping at silent mosquitoes, twisting furiously to confront presences that were not there."
"The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices."
"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."
"One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
"At last, small witches, goblins, hags,<br/>And pirates armed with paper bags,<br/>Their costumes hinged on safety pins,<br/>Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins."
"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."
"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."
"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."
"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."
"I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone."
"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."
"He shows the magisterial ability to keep talking, however busily he appears engaged in conjuring up a world, about himself."
"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."
"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."
"I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either."