Quotes from John Updike

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

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.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics.

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.

The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

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.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

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

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

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

Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

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.

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

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

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

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

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

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.

The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.