John Updike Quotes

American novelist, poet (1932–2009)

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John Hoyer Updike (18 March 1932 – 27 January 2009) was an American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.

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Alternative Names: John Hoyer Updike

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You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.

Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.

Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.

When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.

Which witch is which?

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.

He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."

College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they’re getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don’t give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It’s all phony, they’re there because parents don’t want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. ‘My little Johnny’s at Haavahd.’

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.

On being conscious of being a writer:
As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. [...] Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip – all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dinning-room table, with a child’s beautifully clear eyes.

[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."