Quotes by John Updike

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

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

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.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

I know more about what its like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand Im a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word wisdom has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, Im a little wiser.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I must say, when I reread myself, its the poetry I tend to look at. Its the most exciting to write, and its over the quickest.

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

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

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

“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?”

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

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