John Updike Quotes

Life serves up satire. Unfortunately. Or fortunately. I don't know. You have to reel it in to drama.

I think comedy is the perfect vehicle for that which is slightly beyond life.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

The truth is really funny. It's uncomfortable sometimes, it's dramatic sometimes, but it's really funny. Life is funny.

The absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

I mean, you know, we don't live in a perfect world.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Life is such a tragicomedy.

Life is tragic comedy, in a way. There is humor.

Real life is much stranger than fiction, man.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy. That's the comedy that I like.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.

It's an odd world.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

If I had a nickel for every time I said 'Why me?' I'd have probably said 'Why me?' more often.

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.