John Updike quotes:

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

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.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

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 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.

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.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

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.

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

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

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

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.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.

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

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

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

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

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

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

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

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

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

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

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

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

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

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.

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

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.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

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

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

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

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

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

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

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

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 necessities.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

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

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

[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.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

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

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

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

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

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

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?

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

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.

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

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.

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.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

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