Quotes By John Updike
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.
John Updike
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.
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
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
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
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike