All John Updike Quotes
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
62% of people like this quote
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
61% of people like this quote
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
John Updike
61% of people like this quote
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
59% of people like this quote
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
59% of people like this quote
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
58% of people like this quote
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
58% of people like this quote
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
58% of people like this quote
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
57% of people like this quote
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
John Updike
56% of people like this quote
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
56% of people like this quote
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
55% of people like this quote
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
55% of people like this quote
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike
55% of people like this quote
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