John Updike Quotes

Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

They’ve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him — so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural course. Like a river, print flowed to its readers, and the cheapness of the means permitted it, where the channel was narrow, to trickle. This electronic flood you describe has no banks; it massively delivers but what to whom? There is something intrinsically small about its content, compared to the genius of its working. And--if I may point out a technical problem--its product never achieves autonomy from its means of delivery. A book can lie unread for a century, and all it needs to come to life is to be scanned by a literate brain.

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant of a teacher and a learner.

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.

I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either.

What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.