Quotes from John Updike

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

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

Human was the music, natural was the static.

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

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

Without rain, there would be no life.

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.