Quotes by John Updike

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

“I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.”

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch...”

“Theyve not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him.”

“Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their littl...”

“Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.”

“Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural course. Like a river, print flowed to its readers, and the cheapness...”

“In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear ...”

“The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been ...”

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

“The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an ...”

“One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.”

“The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.”

“Mozart's music gives us permission to live.”

“Sex is like money only too much is enough.”

“Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.”

“The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.”