100 Great Quotes By John Updike For Literary Arbiters
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
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.
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
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.
