John Updike Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
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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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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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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 smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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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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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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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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He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
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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 Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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.
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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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re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
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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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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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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.
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.