Quotes by John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

Mozarts music gives us permission to live.

Sex is like money only too much is enough.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while youre still in it.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

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

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

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

Humor is my default mode.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

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.

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

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

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

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Were past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and its up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another days progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.