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John Updike citations
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John Hoyer Updike est un écrivain américain, auteur de romans, de nouvelles, de poésie et d'essais critiques sur l'art et la littérature. Après avoir accédé à la notoriété internationale avec son roman Le Centaure en 1963 , il rencontre un très grand succès public et critique avec sa tétralogie sur le personnage de Harry « Rabbit » Angstrom : Cœur de lièvre, Rabbit rattrapé, Rabbit est riche et Rabbit en paix, ces deux derniers volumes ayant chacun reçu le prix Pulitzer. John Updike est l'auteur de vingt-six romans et de centaines de nouvelles, de chroniques et de poèmes, travaux publiés en particulier régulièrement dans le New Yorker et la New York Review of Books, et qui ont donné lieu à plusieurs recueils. Il dépeint l'Amérique des petites villes, protestantes et bourgeoises, et accorde une importance récurrente aux thèmes universels du sexe, de la foi, de la mort, et à leurs entrelacements. Son œuvre abondante et variée, quoique souvent considérée comme inégale, vaut à John Updike d'être considéré comme l'un des écrivains américains les plus importants du XXe siècle. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. mars 1932 – 27. janvier 2009  •  Autres noms John Hoyer Updike, Con Apdayk
John Updike photo
John Updike: 240 citations0 J'aime

John Updike: Citations en anglais

“Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.”

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John Updike

Act II
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“Did Nelson ever tell you the story," Pru asks Annabelle, "how he lost the agency up his nose?”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“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.”

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John Updike

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

“Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.”

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John Updike

John Updike, reviewing The Only Problem in New Yorker, July 23, 1984.

“His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.”

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John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run (1960)

“You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.”

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John Updike

Rabbit is Rich (1981)

“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.”

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John Updike

“The Disposable Rocket,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1993)

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

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John Updike

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

“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

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John Updike

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)

“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.”

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John Updike

London Observer (25 March 1979)

“Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux (1969)

“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.”

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John Updike

Life Magazine (September 1986)

“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?”

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John Updike

Salon interview (2000)

“[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

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John Updike

Writers on Themselves (1986)

“Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.”

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John Updike

Speech at the Book Expo America Saturday Book & Author Breakfast (26 May 2006) https://web.archive.org/web/20080807154650/http://bookexpocast.com/2006/05/26/bea-2-john-updike-speech/

“When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

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John Updike

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)

“Mim has hung up. She has a life to get on with.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

“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.”

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John Updike

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

“"… Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.”

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John Updike livre Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

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