John Updike Quotes

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

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

[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.

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don’t—whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

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

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

Growth is betrayal.

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

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.

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...

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.

Driving is boring, " Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

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

Oh, ' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.

One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

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

Humor is my default mode.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.