Quotes from John Updike

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.

One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road.

It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.

as souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.

Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

Part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn't know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.

I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened.

How many more, I must ask myself, such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?

They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.

No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.

I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.

Nobody belongs to us, except in memory." (Grandparenting [1994])

America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.

What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.