Quotes By 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
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.
John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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
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
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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
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.
John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
John Updike