John Updike
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.Collection: Space
We are most alive when we're in love.Collection: Valentines
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.Collection: Men
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.Collection: Dreams
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.Collection: Marriage
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.Collection: Brainy
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.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Marriage
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.Collection: Sympathy
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Art
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.Collection: Patience
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.Collection: Wisdom
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.Collection: Respect
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.Collection: Money
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Education
Humor is my default mode.Collection: Humor
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.Collection: Religion
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.Collection: Sports
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.Collection: Architecture
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.Collection: Poetry
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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.
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.