Quotes by John Updike

John Updike

John Updike

American writer and criticus

Lived from: 1932 - 2009

Category: Media | Writers (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 18 march 1932 Died: 27 january 2009

  • Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
  • 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.
  • To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

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  • A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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  • Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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  • A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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  • America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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  • Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
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  • 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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  • An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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  • Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
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  • 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.
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  • Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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  • By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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  • Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ''somebody,'' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.
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  • 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.
    ― John Updike
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  • Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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  • Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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  • Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
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  • Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
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  • 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.
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  • Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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  • I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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What are the most famous quotes from John Updike?

The two most famous quotes from John Updike are:

  • "A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."
  • "Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books."

When did John Updike live?

John Updike was born in 1932 and died in the year 2009.