For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. – John Updike
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. – John Updike
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. – John Updike
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. – John Updike
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. – John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. – John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. – 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
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. – John Updike
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers’ main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. – John Updike
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. – John Updike