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."

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.

[Nelson, re watching TV] He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials...

No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining
and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the
rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and
plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than
its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.

From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

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

Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.

Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

That's the genius of the capitalist system: Either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.