John Updike

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter.

It’s a man’s world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

She hasn’t been attending a weekly women’s discussion group down here for nothing. She feels indignant enough, independent enough, to get up and march into the kitchen and open the cabinet doors and pull down the Campari bottle and an orange-juice glass.

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach.

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

Our genes keep unfolding as long as we live. Harry tastes in his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father’s breath. Poor Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

[President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips—can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

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

In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

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.

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

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

[TJhose running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to dis- play.

“I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.”

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.

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

Art imitates Nature in this: not to dare is to dwindle.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

A soggy little island huffing and puffing to keep up with Western Europe.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.