John Updike Quotes
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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
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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 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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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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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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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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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
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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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If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
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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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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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about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
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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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He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
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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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Harry having drawn at golf The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?
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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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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.