“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
Alone
“Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
DreamsAll Quotes by John Updike
“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
Religion“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”
Marriage“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
Poetry“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“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
Government“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“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
Patience“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”
Home“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“Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”
Truth“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
Art“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“We are most alive when we're in love.”
Love“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”
Religion“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
Alone“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“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
Wisdom“Dreams come true without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”
Dreams