John Updike Life Quotations

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

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

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.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

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.

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

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.

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

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

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

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

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.