John Updike

John Updike

24 quotes

John Updike, an American writer, is widely remembered for insights that continue to resonate with readers everywhere. With equal ease, John Updike moved between Marriage and Wisdom, finding connections others missed. Our collection holds 29 quotes from John Updike, each offering a different angle on Marriage, Wisdom, Religion, Government, and Art. To get a sense of their style, try: "Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."

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

— John Updike

Patience

All Quotes by John Updike

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

— John Updike

Marriage

“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”

— John Updike

Religion

“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

— John Updike

Government

“Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

— John Updike

Truth

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

— John Updike

Wisdom

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

— John Updike

Respect

“The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”

— John Updike

Society

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”

— John Updike

Education

“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

Sports

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

— John Updike

Home

“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

Morning

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

— John Updike

Poetry

“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

— John Updike

Art

“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

Art

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

— John Updike

Dreams

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

— John Updike

Alone

“The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

— John Updike

Marriage

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

— John Updike

Patience

“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”

— John Updike

Religion

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

— John Updike

Experience