Quotes by John Updike

“Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

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

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

“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.”

“To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.”

“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.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.”

“We are most alive when we're in love.”

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

“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 losin...”

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

“Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”

“Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war...”

“I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded...”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”