John Updike quotes

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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
Government
Benevolence
Madness
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike
Dreams
Nature
Possibility
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
Progress
Day
Faces
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
Marriage
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
John Updike
Experience
Ecstasy
Existence
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
Sex
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
Now
Years
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
Art
Change
People
Facts
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
Golf
Past
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
Right
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Government
Love
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike
Men
Money
Children
Eating
Machines
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike
Secrets
Shame
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John Updike
Creativity
Name
Right
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
Time
Partnership