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Age
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know… you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
-John Updike, Interview with Daily Telegraph's Mick Brown, October, 2009
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
-John Updike
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America
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
-John Updike
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Art
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Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
-John Updike
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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
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Atheism
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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
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Authors & Writing
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My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most writers I wanted to make a practical go of it. And my career was eminently practical. I fastened on to this magazine, the New Yorker, that seemed to me to be the top of its class and I tried to get into it, and I did get into it. It was kind of calculating. Kind of crass.
But I framed it to myself as a kind of altruistic ambition. Most jobs in the world were competitive, you had to push someone aside, but writing and art I thought weren't like that. You brought something new into the world without displacing anything else. To entertain people, or to hold out a standard of beauty or to even inform them seemed so self-evidently out of what my father called the rat race. Dog eat dog, in his phrase. He had a despairing picture of the capitalist world, as losers in that system tend to do.
-John Updike
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I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.
-John Updike, (on being an old writer)
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
-John Updike, Quoted in Writers at Work (George Plimpton, ed.), 1976
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Business
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
-John Updike
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Celebrity
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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. 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. One can either see or be seen.
-John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, ch. 6, 1989
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Children
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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.
-John Updike
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Christianity
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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
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City Life, Cities
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The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea
-John Updike, On London, in, "New Yorker", December 22, 1962
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Consumerism
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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
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Creativity
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
-John Updike
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Criticism
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
-John Updike
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Customs
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Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
-John Updike
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Debt / Borrow / Loan
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Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.
-John Updike
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Dreams
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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
-John Updike
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Education
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.
-John Updike
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Facts
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Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
-John Updike
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Fame
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Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
-John Updike
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Fashion
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Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
-John Updike
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Fools, Foolishness
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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
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God
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
-John Updike
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Government
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
-John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
-John Updike
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Infidelity
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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
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Innocence
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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
-John Updike
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Interviews
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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
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Leadership
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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
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Life
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Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
-John Updike
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Love
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An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
-John Updike
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Mankind, Man
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
-John Updike
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Marriage
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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
-John Updike
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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.
-John Updike
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Nudity
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
-John Updike, In Hugging the Shore (1983).
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Patience
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A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
-John Updike, Confessions of a Wild Bore
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Perfection
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
-John Updike
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Poetry
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
-John Updike
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Presidency
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
-John Updike
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Procrastination
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Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
-John Updike, A Month of Sundays
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Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
-John Updike, The Beauty of the Lilies
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Reading
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It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
-John Updike
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Religion
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
-John Updike
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Sanity
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
-John Updike, "Christian Science Monitor", March 5, 1979
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Sex
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
-John Updike, Piet Hanema, in Couples, ch. 5, 1968
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Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to describe the sex act as our descent, or adventure, into a primordial or strange world, having very little to do with how we look in suits or what our educations have been. It's a well of darkness, as it were, that leaves you refreshed.
-John Updike, (on the topic of writing about sex)
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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
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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
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Style
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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
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War
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
-John Updike
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Water
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Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
-John Updike
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Books by and about John Updike
