Top 198 Quotes by John Updike

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

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.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

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

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.