John Updike Quotes

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.

[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."

One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.

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

A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.

Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

Though old himself, he disliked old men.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

[Nelson] "...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."

No matter how cheerful and blameless the day’s activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong — you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into.