Quotes By John Updike

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.

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

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

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.

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

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.