John Updike
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.Collection: Artist
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.Collection: Acceptance
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.Collection: Life
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.Collection: Heart
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Doe
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.Collection: Order
A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.Collection: Glimpse
The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.Collection: Life
Looking foolish does the spirit good.Collection: Doe
It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.Collection: Enemy
We are cruel enough without meaning to be.Collection: Enough
Our lives fade behind us before we die.Collection: Life
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.Collection: Being Yourself
Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.Collection: Nature
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.Collection: Lying
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.Collection: Feelings
Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.Collection: Winning
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.Collection: Writing
What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.Collection: Done
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.Collection: Golf
Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.Collection: Flower
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.Collection: Sunday
You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.Collection: Adventure
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 over-animation. One can either see or be seen.Collection: Input
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.Collection: Crowds
Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.Collection: Life
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.Collection: New York
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.Collection: Heart
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Years
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.Collection: Golf
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?Collection: Coffee
That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.Collection: Breakup
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.Collection: Crush
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.Collection: Eye
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.Collection: Family
Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.Collection: Golf
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.Collection: Mother
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.Collection: Age
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Selfish
Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.Collection: Dream
Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.Collection: Movie
I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.Collection: Real
From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected.Collection: Strong
My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.Collection: Mother
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.Collection: People
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.Collection: Believe