John Updike Quotes - Page 3

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Fraud makes the world go round.

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

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.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

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.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.