All John Updike Quotes
- By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. Dissolved
- 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… Appeals
- An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. Act
- A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. Adult
- 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… Bestow
- Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. Approach
- Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. American
- Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. Activity
- Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. Art
- 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. Biographies
- Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. Aristocracy
- Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. Doe
- For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own… Alike
- 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… Been
- From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. All
- Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. Benevolence
- Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. American
- Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. Currency
- The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. Apartment
- There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. Absolutes
- 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. Aged
- Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. Assumed
- We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. Bearings
- 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… Apparent
- 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… Called