Quotes from John Updike

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.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.

It's spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.

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

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

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

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.

Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.