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John Updike citations
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John Hoyer Updike est un écrivain américain, auteur de romans, de nouvelles, de poésie et d'essais critiques sur l'art et la littérature. Après avoir accédé à la notoriété internationale avec son roman Le Centaure en 1963 , il rencontre un très grand succès public et critique avec sa tétralogie sur le personnage de Harry « Rabbit » Angstrom : Cœur de lièvre, Rabbit rattrapé, Rabbit est riche et Rabbit en paix, ces deux derniers volumes ayant chacun reçu le prix Pulitzer. John Updike est l'auteur de vingt-six romans et de centaines de nouvelles, de chroniques et de poèmes, travaux publiés en particulier régulièrement dans le New Yorker et la New York Review of Books, et qui ont donné lieu à plusieurs recueils. Il dépeint l'Amérique des petites villes, protestantes et bourgeoises, et accorde une importance récurrente aux thèmes universels du sexe, de la foi, de la mort, et à leurs entrelacements. Son œuvre abondante et variée, quoique souvent considérée comme inégale, vaut à John Updike d'être considéré comme l'un des écrivains américains les plus importants du XXe siècle. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. mars 1932 – 27. janvier 2009   •   Autres noms John Hoyer Updike, Con Apdayk
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John Updike: 240   citations 0   J'aime

John Updike: Citations en anglais

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

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John Updike livre 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?”

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John Updike livre 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?”

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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.”

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John Updike

Writers on Themselves (1986)

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

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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.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

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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."”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

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

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John Updike livre 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.”

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John Updike livre 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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“…"That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[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?"”

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John Updike livre 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?”

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John Updike

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

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

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John Updike

“Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)

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

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John Updike livre 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.”

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John Updike

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

“The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

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John Updike livre Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

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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.”

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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?"”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Janice asks.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

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John Updike

The New Yorker (30 July 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.”

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John Updike livre 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."”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

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