Art & Creativity Quote by John Updike

Updike frames art less as a trophy case of “great works” and more as a pressure valve. “Space” is an almost aggressively plain word, which is the point: he’s not promising revelation, salvation, or even improvement. He’s arguing for a modest, humane function art performs when modern life crowds the psyche with deadlines, noise, and other people’s demands. Art, in this view, doesn’t hand you answers; it rearranges the room so you can hear yourself think.

The phrase “breathing room” does quiet rhetorical heavy lifting. It borrows from architecture and emergency medicine at once: you picture both a cramped apartment and a body struggling for air. Updike’s subtext is that the spiritual life in a secular age doesn’t disappear; it suffocates. Art becomes a secular stand-in for older forms of contemplation, creating a pocket of attention where feeling can expand without being immediately monetized, scored, or defended. That “certain” is telling, too: the room is limited, temporary, conditional. Art is not a cure; it’s a respite.

Context matters because Updike is a chronicler of American middle-class interiors, of desire and doubt inside ordinary routines. He knew how easily a life becomes all surface and schedule. The intent here isn’t to romanticize artists as prophets, but to justify why novels, paintings, songs still matter when they don’t fix policy or pay the bills: they make the spirit less crowded, which is sometimes the prerequisite for doing anything else.