John Updike

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

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

“Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

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

“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.”

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

“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

“The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”

“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.”

“Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

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