John Updike

Quotes Books Biography Comments

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.
Quote by John Updike

Click on the picture of John Updike quote you want to see a larger version.

John Updike Quotes

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Truth should not be forced it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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 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.
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Best Quotes