John Updike

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.

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• The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
  • On London, in “A Madman,” New Yorker (22 December 1962)

• 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.
  • “A Foreword for Younger Readers,” Assorted Prose (1965)

• A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
  • “Confessions of a Wild Bore” in Assorted Prose (1965)

• 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.
  • On J. D. Salinger, in Studies in J. D. Salinger : Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and other Fiction (1963) edited by Marvin Laser and Norman Fruman, p. 231; also quoted in The Christian Science Monitor (August 26, 1965)

• I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
  • On completing a long novel, New York Times (7 April 1968)

• Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
  • A Month of Sundays (1975)

• When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
  • Quoted in George Plimpton ed Writers at Work' Viking (1976)

• Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
  • “Marching through a Novel” in Tossing and Turning (1977)

• I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. 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.
  • Interview in New York Times Book Review (10 April 1977). later published in Conversations with John Updike (1994) edited by James Plath, p. 113

• I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
  • Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston, Massachusetts (30 January 1978)

• I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
  • Testimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor, Boston (January 30, 1978)

• America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
  • “How to Love America and Leave it at the Same Time,” Problems and Other Stories (1979)

• That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
  • Too Far To Go, foreword (1979)

• We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
  • Christian Science Monitor (5 March 1979)

• I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
  • London Observer (25 March 1979)

• 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.
  • "They Thought They Were Better" in TIME magazine (21 July 1980)

• Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
  • “Going Barefoot,” On the Vineyard (1980)

• Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
  • Accepting Edward MacDowell Medal, New York Times (26 August 1981)

• Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
  • Hugging the Shore, foreword (1983)

• 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.
  • “The Bankrupt Man,” Hugging the Shore

• 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.
  • Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)

• The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
  • Introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 1984 (1984)

• Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
  • On Muriel Spark’s The Only Problem (1984), New Yorker (23 July 1984)

• He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
  • On Franz Kafka, quoted in report on Great Books discussion groups, New York Times (28 February 1985)

• 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.
  • 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)

• He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
  • On T S Matthews, and his biography of T. S. Eliot, Great Tom (1974), in The New Yorker (25 March 1985)

• I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.
  • On a child doing homework near the family’s television set, in Roger’s Version (1986)

• 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.
  • As quoted in “When Writers Turn to Brave New Forms” by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times (24 March 1986)

• We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
  • On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)

• 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.
  • Life Magazine (September 1986)

• It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
  • Interview in London Observer (30 August 1987)

• In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
  • “The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

• 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.
  • “The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

• 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.
  • The New Yorker (30 July 1990)

• Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
  • The New Yorker (November 1992)

• The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.
  • “The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

• Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
  • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)

• Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
  • Speech at the Book Expo America Saturday Book & Author Breakfast (26 May 2006)

The Centaur (1963)

• 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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
  • Ch. 4

• I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

• Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.

• 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.

Couples (1968)

• Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
  • Ch. 1

• An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
  • Ch. 2

• It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.
  • Ch. 2

• The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
  • Ch. 5

• Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
  • Ch. 5

• By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
  • Ch. 5

Rabbit Redux (1969)

• Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

• Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

• All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.

• Like water, blood must run or grow scum.

• Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

• There was a beauty here, 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.

Bech, A Book (1970)

• From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

• The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.

• It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

Buchanan Dying (1974)

• 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.
  • Act I

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

• There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
  • Act II

• To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
  • Act II

Writers on Themselves (1986)

The New York Times (17 August 1986)

• Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

• Writers take words seriously — perhaps the last professional class that does — and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

• One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.

• The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)

• Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
  • Ch. 1

• The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
  • Ch. 1

• Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
  • Ch. 3

• 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?
  • Ch. 4

• 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.
  • Ch. 4

• 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, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
  • Ch. 6; Gratia Dei sum quod sum translates to ”Thanks be to God that I am what I am”

• 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.
  • Ch. 6

• The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
  • Ch. 6

• The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
  • Ch. 6

• 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 overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
  • Ch. 6

• Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
  • Ch. 6

• What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
  • Ch. 6

• 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.
  • Ch. 6

• When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
  • Ch. 6

• Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
  • Ch. 6

Salon interview (2000)

Interview at Salon.com

• It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived — especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars — not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul.

• In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.

• When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.

• An author that's in now might be out in ten years. And vice-versa. Who knows when the final sifting is done, in the year 2050, say, who will be read of my generation? You'd like to think you will be one. But there has to be a constant weeding that goes on. The Victorians read all kinds of writers who we don't have time for now. Who reads Thackeray? An educated person reads Dickens, or reads some Dickens. But Thackeray?

About John Updike

• He left the self-conscious literary demimonde of New York for the quiet infidelities of New England.
  • John Heilpern, London Observer (March 25, 1979)

• John Updike's genius is best excited by the lyric possibilities of tragic events that, failing to justify themselves as tragedy, turn unaccountably into comedies.
  • Joyce Carol Oates