“The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”
Marriage
“Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
ExperienceAll Quotes by John Updike
“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.”
Marriage“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
Government“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”
Home“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
Alone“We are most alive when we're in love.”
Love“Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”
Art“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.”
Leadership“Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”
Experience“Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”
Sports“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
Poetry“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.”
Education“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
Art“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.”
Society“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”
Religion“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
Wisdom“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
Patience“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
Religion“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.”
Morning“Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
Dreams