760 Quotes by John Updike

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

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

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

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

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.