760 Quotes by John Updike

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.