John Updike Quotes
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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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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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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 take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
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Janice Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.
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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
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Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
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Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
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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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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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'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.'
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These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
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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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I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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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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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.