John Updike Quotes

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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

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.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

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.

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.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

We are most alive when we're in love.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

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.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

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

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

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

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.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

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.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

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

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

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

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.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

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

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

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.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

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