John Updike quotes

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, and literary critic, widely celebrated for his insightful portrayal of everyday life. His works, including the acclaimed "Rabbit" series, explore themes of identity, faith, and middle-class American experience. He remains a significant figure in modern American literature for his elegant prose and perceptive social commentary. Here are 289 of his quotes:

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

John Updike

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

John Updike

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

John Updike

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

John Updike

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

John Updike

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

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

John Updike

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

John Updike

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

John Updike

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

John Updike

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

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

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

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

John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

John Updike

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

John Updike

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

John Updike

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

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

John Updike

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

John Updike

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

John Updike

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike