"To be a human being is to..." - Quote by John Updike

“The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.”

“The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.”

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

“We don't know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it”

“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

“Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics.”

“What is this talked-of mystery of birth. But being mounted bareback on the earth?”

“Childhood and youth are ends in themselves, not stages.”

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”