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.
-
'Did Nelson ever tell you the story,' Pru asks Annabelle, 'how he lost the agency up his nose?'
-
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
-
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
-
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.
-
I think 'taste' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
-
We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
-
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.
-
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
-
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
-
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
-
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
-
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
-
'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.'
-
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?'
-
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
-
Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
-
Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
-
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
-
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
-
'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.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.