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All Quotes by author - John Updike

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "

" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "

" All love comes from the family. "

" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "

" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "

" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "

" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. "

" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "

" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

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

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "

" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

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