Zitat des Tages von John Updike:
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
Writing makes you more human.
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
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.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
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.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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.
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
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.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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.
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.
Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
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.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
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.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
