John Updike Quotes - Page 2

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

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?

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Looking foolish does the spirit good.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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

We are most alive when we're in love.

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

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

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.