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John Updike Quotes
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John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once , Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series , which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike was recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – he wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".



Wikipedia  

✵ 18. March 1932 – 27. January 2009  •  Other names John Hoyer Updike, Con Apdayk
John Updike photo
John Updike: 240 quotes10 likes

John Updike Quotes

“[Nelson, to Harry] "…I keep feeling hassled."
"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

"I suppose."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“…there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 4

“One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.”

John Updike

Writers on Themselves (1986)

“He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.”

John Updike

On T S Matthews, and his biography of T. S. Eliot, Great Tom (1974), in The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

“[Harry listening to car radio] …he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
Rabbit feels betrayed. He was reared in a world where war was not strange but change was: the world stood still so you could grow up in it. He knows when the bottom fell out. When they closed down Kroll's, Kroll's that had stood in the centre of Brewer all those years, bigger than a church, older than a courthouse, right at the head of Weiser Square there,… […] So when the system just upped one summer and decided to close Kroll's down, just because shoppers had stopped coming in because the downtown had become frightening to white people, Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. If Kroll's could go, the courthouse could go, the banks could go. When the money stopped, they could close down God himself.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.”

John Updike

On a child doing homework near the family’s television set, in Roger’s Version (1986)

“[Nelson] "…People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“His voice is hurrying, to keep up with his brain.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

John Updike

On J. D. Salinger, from a review of his Franny and Zooey, in Studies in J. D. Salinger : Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231; also quoted in The Christian Science Monitor (August 26, 1965) and Updike's Assorted Prose (1965).

“Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away. ] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

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

John Updike

“Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)

“She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world…”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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

Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston (January 30, 1978)

“Like water, blood must run or grow scum.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“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

Bech, A Book (1970)

“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

As quoted in “When Writers Turn to Brave New Forms” by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (24 March 1986)

“[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Janice asks.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[Thelma] "…You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“"Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."
"Who says?"
"I say; everybody says!"
"Why would we have a Depression?"
"Because we don't have any discipline! We're drowning in debt! We don't even own our own country any more!"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

[Harry, to Nelson]
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“…he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Weeds don't know they're weeds.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."
"Maybe he did. You don't get to see what a bastard I can be."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.”

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

“[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39] "This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem…"”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“[Re Annabelle] …she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

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

John Updike book Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 5

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

John Updike

Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston, Massachusetts (30 January 1978)

“As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world…”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“…he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. […] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

John Updike

Bech, A Book (1970)