Quotes from John Updike

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

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

[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.

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.

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.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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.

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

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.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

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

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

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.

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.

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.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

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.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.