Quotes by John Updike
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
We are most alive when we're in love.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
