John Updike Quotes

A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward. it's like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you'd have a crash.

A lot of my music is just self-observation. Like telling you, "Oh man. What did I just do? How much did I just pay for this chain? Why did I do that? Wait a minute." Let me talk about that. Or like, the temptation. Let me talk about that. Let me observe myself.

I am not very introspective.

I've always been a very self-aware person.

If I can avoid looking at myself, I will. I don't care to examine myself or see much of what I do. I never care how I look.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

A lot of times, I'm singing things that are observational and am definitely including myself.

I like the state of being self-aware, it's interesting when you start to look at your own habits.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.

Once the current of awareness of the self is set afoot, it becomes everlasting and continuous by intensification.

I don't like to be my own audience, I find that being my own audience, being in the audience, makes me self-conscious, basically. So I tune in sometimes, with the sound off, to check it out and I back up to it. In the future I will look at it when some time has passed.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

I find myself fascinating.

I spend half my time just living my life, and the other half analyzing it.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

You find out what you think by talking to yourself.

I work because I have issues and questions and feelings and thoughts that I want to have a look at. I'm not in need of, or wanting, particularly, to know what other folk are up to.

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.