John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
[Annabelle] "...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much."
...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.
He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
[At news that Nelson got himself a counsellor] Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals.
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.