John Updike Quotes
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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
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Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
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Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
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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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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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We are most alive when we’re in love.
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.