Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt.

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

I simply like guns because you can't shoot people without them.

I wasn't used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn't known that before; I thought I was just short.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

If we define a misanthrope as 'someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,' we have described a person with something to look forward to.

The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.

God may have loved the common people, but a trip to any shopping mall suggests that He made far too many of them.

Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.

Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

Maybe Heaven will be a library. Then I will be able to finish my to-read list.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Even when we seek advice from others, deep inside we wish the advice given to us is the one we are secretly already wishing for in our hearts.

Ignore self –doubt and inner conflict. Dwell on positive thoughts.

Life is uncertain. We can never predict when hard times shall strike.

I think that if you can roast a chicken, you can get whatever you want out of a woman.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

Under the lean system, any tools which are required for solving problems are used.

The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.

Films are always different from books.