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

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

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

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.
John Updike

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

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

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike

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

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

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

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
John Updike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
John Updike

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