John Updike quotes

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
- 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.
- 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.
- John Updike

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
- John Updike

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
- John Updike

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
- John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- John Updike

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
- John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
- John Updike

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
- 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.
- John Updike

One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator's point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
- John Updike

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
- John Updike

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.
- John Updike

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
- John Updike

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
- John Updike

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- John Updike

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
- John Updike

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
- John Updike

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
- John Updike

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
- 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.
- John Updike

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
- John Updike

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
- John Updike

Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
- John Updike