Quotes By 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.

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.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

We are most alive when we're in love.

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

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

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.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

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.

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.

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

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.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.