Quotes By 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.

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.

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

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

We are most alive when we're in love.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

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.