John Updike Quotes

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.

He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.

...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.

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.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.

...they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.

[Nelson] "...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled."

Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

[Pru, to Harry] She tells him, "You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you."

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

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

Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.