1. People
    2.  › 
  2. John Updike
John Updike photo

John Updike Quotes

Total quotes: 7
“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”
— John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism
Tagged: book, Desire, Writings, Literature
“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
— John Updike, The Complete Henry Bech
Tagged: Dreams, Enouragement, Possibility
“That’s the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”
— John Updike, Rabbit Redux
Tagged: caring, thoughtful, overprotective
“Not only are selves conditional but they die. 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? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot.”
— John Updike, Self-Consciousness
Tagged: Death, Change, Personality
“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.”
— John Updike, Rabbit Redux
Tagged: Wants, Things
“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
— John Updike, My Father's Tears: And Other Stories
Tagged: Love, Memory, Past
“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”
— John Updike, The Snark Handbook: Sex Edition
Tagged: Sex, Sex Is..., John Updike
loading next page...