760 Quotes by John Updike

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ''somebody,'' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.