John Updike Quotes

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

[Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away.] "That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?"

[Mr Shimada] "Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct."

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.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

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

...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.

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

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

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

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.

Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge.

[Janice] Looking back from this distance, she can't think any more that Harry was all to blame for their early troubles, he had just been trying life on too: life and sex and making babies and finding out who you are.