Top 198 Quotes by John Updike

About John Updike

These are some quotes by American author John Updike Novelist, who lived between March 18, 1932 and January 27, 2009.

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

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

John Updike

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

John Updike

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

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

John Updike

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

John Updike

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

John Updike

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

John Updike

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

John Updike

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

John Updike

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

John Updike

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