Quotes from John Updike
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.
- John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
- John Updike
I have never liked haircuts.
- John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
- John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
- John Updike
It's spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.
- John Updike
Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.
- John Updike
One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore... and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
- John Updike
The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
- John Updike
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- John Updike