John Updike

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."

"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop."

"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."

"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."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."