John Updike

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

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.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

Humor is my default mode.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

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

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

Sex is like money only too much is enough.

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

We are most alive when we're in love.