760 Quotes by John Updike

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.