It rots a writers brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily youre well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician. – John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen. – John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. – John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. – John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other peoples patience. – John Updike
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another days progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. – John Updike
We are most alive when were in love. – John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. – John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. – John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. – John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. – John Updike
That a marriage ends is less than ideal but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. – John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. – John Updike
Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. – John Updike
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 an education. – John Updike
