Quotes from John Updike

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.

The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

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.

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

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.

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.

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

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

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.