Top 488 Quotes & Sayings by John Updike - Page 2

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

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

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.

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

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

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

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

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

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.

Writing makes you more human.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

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

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

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

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.

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

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

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

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.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

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

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

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 good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.

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

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

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

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

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

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.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.