Quotes from John Updike

Growth is betrayal.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.

We are most alive when we're in love.

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

The fucking world is running out of gas.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body.

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

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

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.

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

The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.

Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists.

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.

I like middles. . . It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

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