John Updike Quotes
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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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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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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
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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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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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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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Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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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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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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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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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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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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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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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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 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.'
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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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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'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.'