John Updike Quotes

“Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.”

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”

“As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.”

“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

“If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”

“You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.”

“Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.”

“I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature.”

“My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.”

“The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.”

“You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.”

“Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.”

“To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.”

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

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

“I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.”

“Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.”

“When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.”

“So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.”

“Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

“I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.”

“The days are short,The sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and dark.”