John Updike Quotes
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When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.
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Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
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Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
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Mr Shimada 'Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct.'
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If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
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Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
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Pru '...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal.'
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Pru, to Harry She tells him, 'You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you.'
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I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
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Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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I think 'taste' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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Charlie interrupts impatiently, 'Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill.'
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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.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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'Did Nelson ever tell you the story,' Pru asks Annabelle, 'how he lost the agency up his nose?'
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.