John Updike Quotes - 9quotes.com

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Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
Written by John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
Written by John Updike
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
Written by John Updike
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.
Written by John Updike
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
Written by John Updike
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.
Written by John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
Written by John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
Written by John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
Written by John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Written by John Updike
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.
Written by John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
Written by John Updike
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
Written by John Updike
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Written by John Updike
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.
Written by John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Written by John Updike
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
Written by John Updike
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.
Written by John Updike
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Written by John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Written by John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Written by John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Written by John Updike
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
Written by John Updike
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
Written by John Updike
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Written by John Updike
We are most alive when we're in love.
Written by John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Written by John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Written by John Updike
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Written by John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
Written by John Updike

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