"Any activity becomes creative when the doer..." - Quote by John Updike

“I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.”

“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.”

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

“It is working within limits that the craftsman reveals himself.”

“On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.”

“I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone's ever had in the history of television.”

“Labor gives birth to ideas.”

“I think a person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don't like what you're doing. There's a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there's no such thing as work, and there's no such thing as getting tired. That's been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they've all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”