Quotes By John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
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.
John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike