John Updike Quotes

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

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

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.

If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything

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.

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

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

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Growth is betrayal.