02UndatedRussia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.John Updike / quote ↗
03UndatedThe scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.John Updike / quote ↗
04UndatedProfessionalism 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.John Updike / quote ↗
05UndatedAmericans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.John Updike / quote ↗
06UndatedTo 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.John Updike / quote ↗
07UndatedDreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.John Updike / quote ↗
09UndatedThe study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.John Updike / quote ↗
10UndatedGolf 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.John Updike / quote ↗
12UndatedRain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.John Updike / quote ↗
13UndatedWe'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.John Updike / quote ↗
14UndatedTo guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.John Updike / quote ↗
15UndatedEach 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.John Updike / quote ↗
16UndatedThe substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.John Updike / quote ↗
17UndatedThe inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.John Updike / quote ↗
18UndatedThe 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.John Updike / quote ↗
19UndatedReligion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.John Updike / quote ↗
20UndatedExistence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.John Updike / quote ↗
21UndatedA 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 / quote ↗
22UndatedIn 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.John Updike / quote ↗
23UndatedThat 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 / quote ↗
24UndatedThe first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.John Updike / quote ↗
