John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
[Harry listening to car radio] ...he resents being made to realise, this late, that the songs of his life were as moronic as the rock the brainless kids now feed on, or the Sixties and Seventies stuff that Nelson gobbled up – all of it designed for empty heads and overheated hormones, an ocean white with foam, and listening to it now is like trying to eat a double banana split the way he used to. It's all disposable, cooked up to turn a quick profit. They lead us down the garden path, the music manufacturers, then turn around and lead the next generation down with a slightly different flavour of glop.
One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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.
Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."
We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.
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.
Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
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.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike's genius is best excited by the lyric possibilities of tragic events that, failing to justify themselves as tragedy, turn unaccountably into comedies.
God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.