John Updike Quotes
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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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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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He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
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Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, 'You ever been to Toledo?'
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We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
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Nelson '...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little.'
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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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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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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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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Nelson, about Harry 'I saw him, eventually,' Nelson says, 'as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. ... But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way.'
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'Driving is boring,' Rabbit pontificates, 'but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.'
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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'...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months.' He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.
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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.