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John Updike Quotes


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John Updike
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009
Nationality: American
Category: Novelist
Subcategory: American Novelist

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

   

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

   

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

   

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

   

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 essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

   

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

   

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.

   

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

   

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.

   

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.

   

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

   

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

   

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

   

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

   

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

   

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

   

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

   

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.

   

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

   

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