John Updike

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why you went.”

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”

“The writer's duty is to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

“An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.”

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

“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“What is art but a way of seeing?”

“Fame is a mask that eats into the face.”

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

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

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, accomplished and inviolable, stealing life away, little by little.”

“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 so many followers.”

“The great thing about the dead, they make space.”

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

“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs.”

“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solicitude is the enemy of well-being.”

“For a writer, his self-consciousness is a commodity. It's his stock in trade. It's what he has to sell.”

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, a peculiar secret self-consciousness appears.”

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