John Updike Quotes

[Ronnie to Nelson] "For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games."

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

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

...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?

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

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.

[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled."

For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class.

There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

We are most alive when we're in love.

When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.

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 ...

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

[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?