John Updike Quotes
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He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
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When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
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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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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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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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Re Annabelle ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.
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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
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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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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
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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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Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
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Harry having drawn at golf The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?
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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
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'...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.
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Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
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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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re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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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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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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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.