Quotes By John Updike

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.

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

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

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.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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

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.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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