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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

“Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, "You ever been to Toledo?"”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.”

John Updike

“The Bankrupt Man,” Hugging the Shore

“…they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, right there on the bus; he grips the chrome bar and leans far over two women with white pleated blouses and laps of packages and closes his eyes and tries to kill it.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“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

“Marching through a Novel” in Tossing and Turning (1977)

“It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.”

John Updike

Bech, A Book (1970)

“Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.”

John Updike

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“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

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

“Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.”

John Updike

John Updike, reviewing The Only Problem in New Yorker, July 23, 1984.

“His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.”

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”

John Updike book Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.”

John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.”

John Updike

“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

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

John Updike

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.”

John Updike

London Observer (25 March 1979)

“Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.”

John Updike

Life Magazine (September 1986)

“An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?”

John Updike

Salon interview (2000)

“Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.”

John Updike book Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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/

“When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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)

“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)

“"… 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)

“[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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“Things change," says Mr Shimada. "Is world's sad secret.”

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)

“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)

“[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)