John Updike Quotes
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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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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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His wife is, it occurs to Harry, a channel that can't be switched. The same slightly too-high forehead, the same dumb stubborn slot of a mouth, day after day, same time, same station.
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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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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At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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'You are cynical.'
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Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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'Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.'
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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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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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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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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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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.
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All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way.
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You don't know what you don't know.
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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.