John Updike Quotes
-
One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and a healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
-
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
-
He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
-
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
-
He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
-
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
-
re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
-
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
-
We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
-
Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
-
coming away from the doctor's after a check-up Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
-
Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
-
...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
-
'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
-
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.
-
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.'
-
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.