All John Updike Quotes
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
52% of people like this quote
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike
52% of people like this quote
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
51% of people like this quote
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike in
Art
50% of people like this quote
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
50% of people like this quote
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
John Updike
49% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
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
49% of people like this quote
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike
49% of people like this quote
Related authors