John Updike Men Quotations

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Women are an alien race set down among us.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

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.

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.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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

How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

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.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

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.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

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.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'