John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
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.
There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
"I mean," he says, "how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?"
You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.
[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming."
[Dr Breit] "It's irrational, but so's the human species."
[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune'] She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
[Nelson] "...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little."
"Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.
Weeds don't know they're weeds.
There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.