John Updike Quotes

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

All blessings are mixed blessings.

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever.

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

In no other sport must the spectator move.

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.