760 Quotes by John Updike

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.