Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

- John Updike

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

- John Updike

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

- John Updike

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

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

- John Updike

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

- John Updike

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

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

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

- John Updike

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

- John Updike

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

- John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

- John Updike

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

- John Updike

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

- John Updike

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

- John Updike

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

- John Updike

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

- John Updike

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

- John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

- John Updike

We are most alive when we're in love.

- John Updike