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Danh ngôn của John Updike (Sứ mệnh: 5)

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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.
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
We are most alive when we're in love.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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.
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.
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.
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.
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.