Quotes from John Updike

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.

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.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

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

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

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.

Nature refuses to rest.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

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

Authors should be honored only for their works.

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

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

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

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

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

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.