John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
...golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. ... Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
When I was a boy, the bestselling books were often the books that were on your piano teacher's shelf. I mean, Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner actually had, considering how hard he is to read and how drastic the experiments are, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.
[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet] "She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it."
"Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?"
Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth.
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.
You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.
When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.
No matter how hard you climb, there are always the rich above you, who got there without effort. Lucky stiffs, holding you down, making you discontent so you buy more of the crap advertised on television.
Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
You don't know what you don't know.
Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.
[Nelson, about Harry] "I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. [...] But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."
[Thelma] "...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it."
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.
[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."