Quotes from John Updike

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

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

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

The days are short The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

What art offers is space — a certain breathing room for the spirit.

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

One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore... and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

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.