John Updike

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

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.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

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

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

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

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.