All John Updike Quotes
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
63% 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
63% of people like this quote
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
61% 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
60% of people like this quote
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
John Updike
58% 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
58% of people like this quote
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
57% of people like this quote
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
56% 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
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
55% of people like this quote
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
54% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
John Updike
53% of people like this quote
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
John Updike
52% of people like this quote
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