John Updike Quotes

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

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.

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

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

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

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

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

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

Not only are selves conditional but they die. 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?

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

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.