John Updike Quotes

We are most alive when we're in love.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

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.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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.

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

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

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

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

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

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

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.

Without rain, there would be no life.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

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.