Quotes from John Updike

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

We are most alive when we're in love.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

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

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

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone

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

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?