John Updike Quotes
-
Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pru, to Harry She tells him, 'You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you.'
-
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
-
Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
-
He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
-
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.'
-
We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
-
The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
-
...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
-
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.
-
One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
-
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.'
-
'...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.
-
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?'
-
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
-
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.
-
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.