John Updike (1932 – 2009)
American novelist, poet, critic and short-story writer.
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.
[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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.
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.
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
[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."
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.
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.
Weeds don't know they're weeds.
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is — its irresistible charm — a fire.
"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."
He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish."