John Updike Quotes
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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 grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
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We are most alive when we’re in love.
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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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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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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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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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
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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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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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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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Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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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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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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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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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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I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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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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You don't know what you don't know.