Quotes by John Updike

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of ones obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

“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.”

“The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.”

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

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

If you have the guts to be yourself, other peoplell pay your price.

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

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

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?

The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

[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.

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.