760 Quotes by John Updike

There’s always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say – or more – a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

I can’t bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There’s something so dead about a finished painting.

And suddenly she was at him, after him with her fists, her struggling weight; he squeezed her against him, regretfully conscious even now, as her pinned fists flailed his shoulders and her face crumpled into contorted weeping and the sharp smell of perfume was scalded from her, that the expression, of serene superiority, of a beautiful secret continually tasted, was still on his face.

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I’m still trying to educate myself. I don’t think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can’t do.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

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.

School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.