Quotes By John Updike

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.