John Updike Quotes

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

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.

He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.

[Harry to Janice, about the financial situation] "...You're in real trouble."

All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.

The houses, many of them no longer lived in by the people whose faces he all knew, are like the houses in a town you see from the train, their brick faces blank in posing the riddle, Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here, why is this town, a dull suburb of a third-rate city, for him the center and index of a universe that contains immense prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of ‘any place,’ prelude to the ultimate, ‘Why am I me?’—ignites panic in his heart.

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

[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."

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God

America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.