United States author (born 1932)

Update this biography »

(0 votes)

Famous quotes by John Updike:Sort:Popular A - Z

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity . . . any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about dong it right, or better.
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and earning money.
It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values-- the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
There are times when fear is good It must keep its watchful place at the heart's controls. There is advantage in the wisdom won from pain.
We are most alive when we're in love.

Missing a quote of John Updike?

Know another good quote of John Updike? Don't keep it to yourself!

The Web's Largest Resource for

Famous Quotes & Sayings

A Member Of The STANDS4 Network