John Updike: Trending quotes (page 2)

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

“If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.”

“We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.”

“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.”

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

“We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.”

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

“The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.”

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.”

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”

“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.”

“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”