"We are most alive when we're in love.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
~ John Updike ~












Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming p...
Show MoreMore John Updike quotes
"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.
"Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
"The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christ...
"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying som...
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
"Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then ou...
"Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be ...
"The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followe...
"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self...
"Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave be...