760 Quotes by John Updike

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.