John Updike Quotes

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

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

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

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

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

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

The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.