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

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.
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

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike

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

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

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

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
John Updike

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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

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.
John Updike

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

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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

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.
John Updike

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike