John Updike: Trending quotes (page 11)

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“The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.”

John Updike

Writers on Themselves (1986)

Life

“Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Children , Time

“Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

World , Feeling , Light , Night

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.”

John Updike

Speech at the Book Expo America Saturday Book & Author Breakfast (26 May 2006) https://web.archive.org/web/20080807154650/http://bookexpocast.com/2006/05/26/bea-2-john-updike-speech/

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

John Updike

On T. S. Eliot (1984) by Peter Ackroyd, in which the Eliot estate forbade quotation from Eliot’s books and letters, The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

“Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Life

“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

Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)

Painting , Falseness

“"… Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Age , Thinking , Christ

“[Mim, to Nelson, after discussing Annabelle's stepfather being dead] "More and more is dead, are you old enough to notice? Vegas is dead, the way it was. […] Now it's herds. Herds and herds of Joe Nobodies. Bozos. The hoi pollio, running up credit-card debt. Gambling is legal in half the states so they've built these huge moron-catchers along the Strip, all the way to the airport. A Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, Venice – it's all here, Nelson, all for the morons. It's depressing as hell."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Way , Hell , Dead

“Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.”

John Updike book The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

Love , Star , Time

“Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

Pain , Children , People , Family

“Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.”

John Updike book In the Beauty of the Lilies

In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)

“But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."
"Who says that's the greatest sin?”

John Updike

"Everybody says it. The church, the government. It's against Nature, to give up, you've got to keep moving. That's the thing about you. You're not moving. You don't want to be here, selling old man Springer's jalopies. You want to be out there, learning something." He gestures toward the west. "How to hang glide, or run a computer, or whatever."
Rabbit is Rich (1981)

Life

“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 George Plimpton ed Writers at Work' Viking (1976)

“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

John Updike

Christian Science Monitor (5 March 1979)

“He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.”

John Updike

On Franz Kafka, quoted in report on Great Books discussion groups, New York Times (28 February 1985)

Pain