John Updike Quotes
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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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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
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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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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.
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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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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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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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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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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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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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Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
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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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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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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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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.