More quotes by John Updike

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."
"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."
"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit."
"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."
"Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey."