John Updike Quotes
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'Well,' his father says, 'I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.'
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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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God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
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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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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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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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Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
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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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Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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At last, small witches, goblins, hags,And pirates armed with paper bags,Their costumes hinged on safety pins,Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins.
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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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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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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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. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.