John updike Inspirational Quotes

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

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.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

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.

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

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

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.

Human was the music, natural was the static.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

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

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

Fraud makes the world go round.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

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.

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.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

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.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

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

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.