"An aging writer has the not insignificant..." - Quote by John Updike

“Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.”

“New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.”

“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”

“We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.”

“Good writers have two things in common: they prefer to be understood rather than admired; and they do not write for knowing and over-acute readers.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“Make every decision based on your last years of life instead of your next 10.”

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.”

“Even the death of Friends will inspire us as much as their lives. They will leave consolation to the mourners, as the rich leave money to defray the expenses of their funerals, and their memories will be incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as monuments of other men are overgrown with moss; for our Friends have no place in the graveyard.”