John Updike citations (240 citations, Page 4)

John Updike: 240 citations0 J'aime

John Updike: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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John Updike

Salon interview (2000)

“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.”

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John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6

“No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

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John Updike livre Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

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

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John Updike livre Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 2

“[Judy, 8, is watching TV] He tells Judy, "Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing." But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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

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John Updike livre Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 5

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

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John Updike livre Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

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

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John Updike

Writers on Themselves (1986)

“This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”

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John Updike

Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1

“…golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”

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John Updike

Essay The Bliss of Golf (1982), reprinted in Golf Dreams (1996)

“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”

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John Updike livre Couples

Source: Couples (1968), Ch. 1

“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.”

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John Updike livre The Centaur

The Centaur (1963)

“Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "…You're in real trouble."
"I know… But you have to have faith. You've taught me that."
"I have?" He is pleasantly surprised, to think that in thirty-three years he has taught her anything. "Faith in what?"”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

"In us. In life," she says.
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“…If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The great thing about the dead, they make space.”

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John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“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.”

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John Updike

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“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.”

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John Updike

Interview in London Observer (30 August 1987)

“We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.”

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John Updike

On “consumeristic appetite for interviews,” New York Times (17 August 1986)

“God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“[Nelson, to Harry] "…I keep feeling hassled."
"That's life, Nelson. Hassle."”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

"I suppose."
Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

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