He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.


John Updike

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

She made a fence of phrases, which seemed a treachery to herself.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
Julia poured tea gracefully, but it all ran over into the saucers.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
It appeared to Harriet that she was always the one who remembered having seen other people. They nev...
ELIZABETH TAYLOR
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
HENRY JAMES
You're still lovely," Mor said a bit gently.
Elain offered a half smile. "I suppose that war m...
SARAH J. MAAS
The issue isn't whether he loved you, it's how much. Too much. Love can be poison
SARAH J. MAAS
I am broken and healing, but every piece of my heart belong to you.
SARAH J. MAAS
He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain...
SARAH J. MAAS
Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold ...
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
Hodor," said Hodor.
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
You do what you love, what you need
SARAH J. MAAS
I turned.
Rhysand leaned against the archway into the sitting room, arms crossed, wings nowhere...
SARAH J. MAAS
Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have o...
SARA BARNARD
The scars of others should teach us caution.
ST. JEROME
They talk like angels but they live like men.
ST. JEROME
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not...
SAINT AUGUSTINE
The most High approveth not the gifts of the wicked.
SAINT PATRICK
I see that already in this present world I am exalted above measure by the Lord. And I was not worth...
SAINT PATRICK
He that offereth sacrifice of the goods of the poor is as one that sacrificeth the son in the presen...
SAINT PATRICK
I was freeborn according to the flesh; I am born of a father who was a decurion, but I sold my noble...
SAINT PATRICK
I have had the good fortune through my God that I should never abandon his people whom I have acquir...
SAINT PATRICK
The Lord discovered to me a sense of my unbelief that, though late, I should remember my transgressi...
SAINT PATRICK
Let who will scoff and revile - I will not remain silent; neither will I conceal the signs and wonde...
SAINT PATRICK
I only seek in my old age to perfect that which I had not before thoroughly learned in my youth, bec...
SAINT PATRICK
I have a Creator who knew all things, even before they were made - even me, his poor little child.
SAINT PATRICK
I have vowed to my God to teach the heathen, though I be despised by some.
SAINT PATRICK
No one should ever say that it was my ignorance if I did or showed forth anything however small acco...
SAINT PATRICK
The Lord opened the understanding of my unbelieving heart, so that I should recall my sins.
SAINT PATRICK
It was not any grace in me, but God that put this earnest care into my heart, that I should be one o...
SAINT PATRICK
Sufficient for me is that honour which is not seen of men but is felt in the heart, as faithful is H...
SAINT PATRICK
Before I was humiliated I was like a stone that lies in deep mud, and he who is mighty came and in h...
SAINT PATRICK
I am Patrick, a sinner, most uncultivated and least of all the faithful and despised in the eyes of ...
SAINT PATRICK
The Lord is greater than all: I have said enough.
SAINT PATRICK
Among the many signs of a lively faith and hope we have in eternal life, one of the surest is not be...
SAINT IGNATIUS
I can love a person in this life only insofar as he tries to advance in the praise and service of Go...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Some indeed have tears naturally, when the higher motion of the soul makes itself felt in the lower,...
SAINT IGNATIUS
The principal end both of my father and of myself in the conquest of India... has been the propagati...
SAINT IGNATIUS
We should love the body insofar as it is obedient and helpful to the soul, since the soul, with the ...
SAINT IGNATIUS
We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is really black, if the hierar...
SAINT IGNATIUS
It is one thing to be eloquent and charming in profane speech, and another when the one speaking as ...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Remember that bodily exercise, when it is well ordered, as I have said, is also prayer by means of w...
SAINT IGNATIUS
In the light of the Divine Goodness, it seems to me, though others may think differently, that ingra...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Occupy yourself in beholding and bewailing your own imperfections rather than contemplating the impe...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Be generous to the poor orphans and those in need. The man to whom our Lord has been liberal ought n...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Teach us to give and not to count the cost.
SAINT IGNATIUS
In the fallen there is danger of pride and vainglory, since they prefer their own judgment to the ju...
SAINT IGNATIUS
May God our Lord never let me harm anyone when I cannot help him!
SAINT IGNATIUS
True, I am in love with suffering, but I do not know if I deserve the honor.
SAINT IGNATIUS
May the perfect grace and eternal love of Christ our Lord be our never-failing protection and help.
SAINT IGNATIUS
For those who love, nothing is too difficult, especially when it is done for the love of our Lord Je...
SAINT IGNATIUS
If God has given you the world's goods in abundance, it is to help you gain those of Heaven and ...
SAINT IGNATIUS
Knowledge is sometimes superfluous: when we need it, we have it not.
SAINT BERNARD
For every benefit conferred, God is to be praised in his gifts. Otherwise when the time of judgment ...
SAINT BERNARD
Custom turns everything upside down. Give it time, and what can resist its hardening effect? What do...
SAINT BERNARD
Charity never lacks what is her own, all that she needs for her own security. Not alone does she hav...
SAINT BERNARD
I was made a sinner by deriving my being from Adam; I am made just by being washed in the blood of C...
SAINT BERNARD
The impudence of the sinner displeases God as much as the modesty of the penitent gives him pleasure...
SAINT BERNARD
A man who prides himself on being better than his fellow-men thinks it a disgrace if he does not do ...
SAINT BERNARD
Keep to the middle if you wish to keep moderation. The mid way is the safe way. Moderation abides in...
SAINT BERNARD
Humility is a good estate; founded thereon, the whole spiritual edifice grows into a holy temple in ...
SAINT BERNARD
That heart alone is hard which does not shudder at itself for not feeling its hardness.
SAINT BERNARD
There are people who go clad in tunics and have nothing to do with furs, who nevertheless are lackin...
SAINT BERNARD
You wish me to tell you why and how God should be loved. My answer is that God himself is the reason...
SAINT BERNARD
I myself, however wretched I may be, have been occasionally privileged to sit at the feet of the Lor...
SAINT BERNARD
Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you want is not a sceptre, but a...
SAINT BERNARD
Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong...
SAINT BERNARD
In truth, opinion may be taken for understanding; understanding cannot be taken for opinion. How so?...
SAINT BERNARD
Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not be an endless preoccupation. You must dwell al...
SAINT BERNARD
God removes the sin of the one who makes humble confession, and thereby the devil loses the sovereig...
SAINT BERNARD
We seek for truth in ourselves; in our neighbours, and in its essential nature. We find it first in ...
SAINT BERNARD
I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.
SAINT BERNARD
Among irrational animals the love of the offspring and of the parents for each other is extraordinar...
SAINT BASIL
The woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder. With us there is no nice enqu...
SAINT BASIL
There is nothing unpremeditated, nothing neglected by God. His unsleeping eye beholds all things.
SAINT BASIL
We glorify the Holy Ghost together with the Father and the Son, from the conviction that He is not s...
SAINT BASIL
We do not accost a physician as we do any mere nobody; nor a magistrate as we do a private individua...
SAINT BASIL
Indulging in unrestrained and immoderate laughter is a sign of intemperance, of a want of control ov...
SAINT BASIL
Strive to attain to the greater virtues, but do not neglect the lesser ones. Do not make light of a ...
SAINT BASIL
To lovers of the truth, nothing can be put before God and hope in Him.
SAINT BASIL
Do not despise the fish because they are absolutely unable to speak or to reason, but fear lest you ...
SAINT BASIL
By nature, men desire the beautiful.
SAINT BASIL
Every evil is a sickness of soul, but virtue offers the cause of its health.
SAINT BASIL
Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for ...
SAINT BASIL
God who created us has granted us the faculty of speech that we might disclose the counsels of our h...
SAINT BASIL
What is the benefit of fasting in our body while filling our souls with innumerable evils? He who do...
SAINT BASIL
Now, if you notice how the swan, putting its neck down into the deep water, brings up food for itsel...
SAINT BASIL
Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does n...
SAINT BASIL
Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive...
SAINT BASIL
In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things. Not only our eye, which observes ex...
SAINT BASIL
When I go to Rome, I fast on Saturday, but in Milan I do not. Do you also follow the custom of whate...
SAINT AMBROSE
It is ingrained in all living creatures, first of all, to preserve their own safety, to guard agains...
SAINT AMBROSE
The best way to use the gold of the Redeemer is for the redemption of those in peril.
SAINT AMBROSE
Many a sin has sullied me in body and in soul because I did not restrain my thoughts nor guard my li...
SAINT AMBROSE
Nothing graces the Christian soul so much as mercy; mercy as shown chiefly towards the poor, that th...
SAINT AMBROSE
Take away the contests of the martyrs, and you have taken away their crowns.
SAINT AMBROSE
In some causes silence is dangerous.
SAINT AMBROSE
God is not accustomed to refusing a good gift to those who ask for one. Since he is good, and especi...
SAINT AMBROSE
Let us take refuge from this world. You can do this in spirit, even if you are kept here in the body...
SAINT AMBROSE
It is not enough just to wish well; we must also do well.
SAINT AMBROSE
One of the duties of fortitude is to keep the weak from receiving injury; another, to check the wron...
SAINT AMBROSE

More John Updike

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of t...
JOHN UPDIKE
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Gree...
JOHN UPDIKE
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
JOHN UPDIKE
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek a...
JOHN UPDIKE
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be ...
JOHN UPDIKE
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held...
JOHN UPDIKE
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of K...
JOHN UPDIKE
My father was a scared man. And he communicated his anxiety to me, so that perhaps more than most wr...
JOHN UPDIKE
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
JOHN UPDIKE
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
JOHN UPDIKE
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
JOHN UPDIKE
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the peop...
JOHN UPDIKE
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless...
JOHN UPDIKE
Lawrence had done it in a way, and Joyce. But I think it's an important thing to do now and then, to...
JOHN UPDIKE
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a wa...
JOHN UPDIKE
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, w...
JOHN UPDIKE
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
JOHN UPDIKE
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a...
JOHN UPDIKE
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
JOHN UPDIKE
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the...
JOHN UPDIKE
Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.
JOHN UPDIKE
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect l...
JOHN UPDIKE
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.
JOHN UPDIKE
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we a...
JOHN UPDIKE
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago,...
JOHN UPDIKE
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines...
JOHN UPDIKE
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
JOHN UPDIKE
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
JOHN UPDIKE
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE
Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who ...
JOHN UPDIKE
It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
JOHN UPDIKE
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's p...
JOHN UPDIKE
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
JOHN UPDIKE
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- the...
JOHN UPDIKE
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual pos...
JOHN UPDIKE
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic de...
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
JOHN UPDIKE
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we ar...
JOHN UPDIKE
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that w...
JOHN UPDIKE
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
JOHN UPDIKE
Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When...
JOHN UPDIKE
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
JOHN UPDIKE
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinate...
JOHN UPDIKE
It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, an...
JOHN UPDIKE
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can,...
JOHN UPDIKE
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
JOHN UPDIKE
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
JOHN UPDIKE
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
JOHN UPDIKE
We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
JOHN UPDIKE
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky wa...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open se...
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
JOHN UPDIKE
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
JOHN UPDIKE
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer c...
JOHN UPDIKE
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
JOHN UPDIKE
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. Afte...
JOHN UPDIKE
All love comes from the family.
JOHN UPDIKE
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoym...
JOHN UPDIKE
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull,...
JOHN UPDIKE
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
JOHN UPDIKE
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is free...
JOHN UPDIKE
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumpe...
JOHN UPDIKE
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is ...
JOHN UPDIKE
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and th...
JOHN UPDIKE
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is wh...
JOHN UPDIKE
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
JOHN UPDIKE
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter p...
JOHN UPDIKE
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
JOHN UPDIKE
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvis...
JOHN UPDIKE
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungratef...
JOHN UPDIKE
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
JOHN UPDIKE
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
JOHN UPDIKE
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas br...
JOHN UPDIKE
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable...
JOHN UPDIKE
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview....
JOHN UPDIKE
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within th...
JOHN UPDIKE
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
JOHN UPDIKE
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
JOHN UPDIKE
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a...
JOHN UPDIKE
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the s...
JOHN UPDIKE
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by t...
JOHN UPDIKE
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy re...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
JOHN UPDIKE
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
JOHN UPDIKE
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no s...
JOHN UPDIKE
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolifi...
JOHN UPDIKE
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell ...
JOHN UPDIKE
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied...
JOHN UPDIKE
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I did...
JOHN UPDIKE
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip nove...
JOHN UPDIKE
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what d...
JOHN UPDIKE
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
JOHN UPDIKE
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
JOHN UPDIKE
We are most alive when we're in love.
JOHN UPDIKE
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
JOHN UPDIKE
Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
JOHN UPDIKE
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
JOHN UPDIKE
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty...
JOHN UPDIKE
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get fo...
JOHN UPDIKE
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
JOHN UPDIKE
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the n...
JOHN UPDIKE
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plu...
JOHN UPDIKE
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they ...
JOHN UPDIKE
The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
JOHN UPDIKE
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
JOHN UPDIKE
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its descripti...
JOHN UPDIKE
In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none.
JOHN UPDIKE
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
JOHN UPDIKE
He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a b...
JOHN UPDIKE
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
JOHN UPDIKE
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-b...
JOHN UPDIKE
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are s...
JOHN UPDIKE
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; a...
JOHN UPDIKE
What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
JOHN UPDIKE
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'Th...
JOHN UPDIKE
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigora...
JOHN UPDIKE
I have never liked haircuts.
JOHN UPDIKE
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively mainta...
JOHN UPDIKE
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the en...
JOHN UPDIKE
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-cen...
JOHN UPDIKE
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his wor...
JOHN UPDIKE
Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to stee...
JOHN UPDIKE
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longe...
JOHN UPDIKE
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
JOHN UPDIKE
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it al...
JOHN UPDIKE
All sunshine without a little rain makes a desert.
JOHN UPDIKE
"Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant ...
JOHN UPDIKE
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism
JOHN UPDIKE
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is ...
JOHN UPDIKE
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu...
JOHN UPDIKE
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
JOHN UPDIKE
I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights...
JOHN UPDIKE
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour...
JOHN UPDIKE
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou...
JOHN UPDIKE
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
JOHN UPDIKE
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying
JOHN UPDIKE
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t...
JOHN UPDIKE
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating noti...
JOHN UPDIKE
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they ...
JOHN UPDIKE
His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes...
JOHN UPDIKE
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and...
JOHN UPDIKE
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, becaus...
JOHN UPDIKE
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just start...
JOHN UPDIKE
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of r...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main mater...
JOHN UPDIKE
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...
JOHN UPDIKE
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more...
JOHN UPDIKE
Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ...
JOHN UPDIKE
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...
JOHN UPDIKE
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted h...
JOHN UPDIKE
Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family t...
JOHN UPDIKE
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating ...
JOHN UPDIKE
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a d...
JOHN UPDIKE
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
JOHN UPDIKE
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...
JOHN UPDIKE
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
JOHN UPDIKE
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like li...
JOHN UPDIKE
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over...
JOHN UPDIKE
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extincti...
JOHN UPDIKE
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside o...
JOHN UPDIKE
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
JOHN UPDIKE
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and uns...
JOHN UPDIKE
He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red f...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
JOHN UPDIKE
I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.
JOHN UPDIKE
Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just g...
JOHN UPDIKE