John Updike Quotes

Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.

All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.

One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.

A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking.

as souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

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.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?

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

We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership.

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.

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.

The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.

Man is an animal, but a social animal. Society for its manifold blessings asks in exchange sacrifice and compromise. Concession is the world's walking gait. Fevers and hallucinations sweep over us, it is true; but be they permitted to infect the public body, slaughter shall result. Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.