A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience. John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. John Updike
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. John Updike
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. John Updike
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. John Updike
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours. John Updike
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead? John Updike
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. John Updike
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. John Updike