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. - John Updike
One does not go to Moscow to get fat. - John Updike
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it. - John Updike
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. - John Updike
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. - John Updike
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals. - John Updike
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 something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. - John Updike
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. - John Updike
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. - John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. - John Updike
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. - John Updike
the music was human; the static was natural. - John Updike
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence. - John Updike
Life. Too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. - John Updike
Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. - John Updike
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. - John Updike
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life. - John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews. - John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. - John Updike
We are most alive when we're in love. - John Updike
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. - John Updike
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. - John Updike
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it. - John Updike
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ... - John Updike