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 Quote

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

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

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

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
- John Updike Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
- John Updike Quote

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
- John Updike Quote

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
- John Updike Quote

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
- John Updike Quote

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

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
- John Updike Quote

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
- John Updike Quote

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
- John Updike Quote

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
- John Updike Quote

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.
- John Updike Quote

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.
- John Updike Quote

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
- John Updike Quote

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.
- John Updike Quote

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
- John Updike Quote

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

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.
- John Updike Quote

We are most alive when we're in love.
- John Updike Quote

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
- John Updike Quote

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

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
- John Updike Quote

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