760 Quotes by John Updike

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.

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.