John Updike Quotes

Quotes by Famous Americans Past and Present

John Updike Quotes

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

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

"I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples."

"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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you."

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

"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence."

"Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews."

"Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does— and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money."

"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."

"I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time."

"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."

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

"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."

"I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."

"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."

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

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."

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

"I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is—its irresistible charm—a fire."

"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."

"It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."

"Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile."

"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."

"Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner."

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

"To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given."

"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."

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