Quotes from John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
- John Updike
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
- John Updike
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
- John Updike
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
- John Updike
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
- John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
- John Updike
Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
- John Updike
A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.
- John Updike
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
- John Updike
The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
- John Updike