760 Quotes by John Updike

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.