John Updike

(22 votes)   An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

John Updike
American, Novelist Quotes

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(21 votes)   America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike
American, Novelist Quotes

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(12 votes)   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
American, Novelist Quotes

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(266 votes)   It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(232 votes)   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?

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(202 votes)   Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(136 votes)   Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(117 votes)   Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(111 votes)   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
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(99 votes)   It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(95 votes)   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.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(84 votes)   In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(84 votes)   When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(72 votes)   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?

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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(67 votes)   Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

John Updike
1932-, American Novelist, Critic

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