John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.
When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle] "She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend."
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
The male sense of space must differ from that of the female, who has such interesting, active, and significant inner space. The space that interests men is outer. The fly ball high against the sky, the long pass spiraling overhead, the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at 40,000 feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar — these bring portents with them and awaken a sense of relation with the invisible, with the empty. The ideal male body is taut with lines of potential force, a diagram extending outward; the ideal female body curves around centers of repose.
There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.
"...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be."
[at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward] "What's wrong with his heart, exactly?" Janice asks.
"...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months." He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.
Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.