760 Quotes by John Updike

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.