Top 488 Quotes & Sayings by John Updike - Page 4

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

I'm a dull person.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

I like short stories.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

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

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.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

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

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

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

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

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

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

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.

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

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

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

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

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

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

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

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

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

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

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

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

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.