"Basically it's true that my own life..." - Quote by John Updike

“Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.”

“irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.”

“Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.”

“Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.”

“Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.”

“I feel like my life is something purposeful. Many people have told me that after they listen to my talk, some point which I made, they got certain ideas and their whole life is changed. They are happier.”

“We live in a country where we're supposed to have freedom of the press and religious freedom, but I think to some degree, there's a sense of fear in America today, that if you say the wrong thing, what some people will consider what is wrong, if you step out of line, if you dissent, whether you be an entertainer, that somehow and some way this government or the forces to be will come down on you.”

“Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.”

“The Americans, like the English, probably make love worse than any other race.”