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John Updike Quote

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John Updike

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John Updike

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

Source/Notes: Confessions of a Wild Bore in Assorted Prose (1965)

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John Updike

“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.”

Source/Notes: They Thought They Were Better in TIME magazine (21 July 1980)

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John Updike

“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.”

Source/Notes: Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)

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John Updike

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

Source/Notes: How to Love America and Leave it at the Same Time, Problems and Other Stories (1979)

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John Updike

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

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John Updike

“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”

Source/Notes: Couples (1968)

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John Updike

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

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John Updike

“Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.”

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John Updike

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

Source/Notes: Going Barefoot, On the Vineyard (1980)

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John Updike

“But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.”

Source/Notes: On T. S. Eliot (1984) by Peter Ackroyd, in which the Eliot estate forbade quotation from Eliot's books and letters, The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

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John Updike

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

Source/Notes: Couples (1968)

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John Updike

“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

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John Updike

“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.”

Source/Notes: The New Yorker (30 July 1990)

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John Updike

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

Source/Notes: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)

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