John Updike quotes - page 12

Upon shaving off one's beard. The scissors cut the long-grown hair the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was. (John Updike)
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. View quote
John Updike
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the soul's very life. View quote
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you. View quote
John Updike
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill. View quote
John Updike
[Nelson, to Harry] "...I keep feeling hassled." View quote
John Updike
[Harry, to Thelma, about Janet]. View quote
John Updike
Life is noise. View quote
John Updike
[Pru] "...He's still trying to work out what you two did to him, as if you were the only parents in the world who didn't keep wiping their kid's ass until he was thirty. I tell him: Get real, Nelson. Lousy parents are par for the course. My God. Nothing's ideal." View quote
John Updike
In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself. View quote
John Updike
[Harry, to Nelson] "Don't forget, there's a Depression coming." (John Updike)
[re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune']. View quote
John Updike
[Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle]. View quote
John Updike
It was true of my generation, that the movies were terribly vivid and instructive. There were all kinds of things you learned. Like the 19th century novels, you saw how other social classes lived - especially the upper classes. So in a funny way, they taught you manners almost. But also moral manners. The gallantry of a Gary Cooper or an Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart. It was ethical instruction of a sort that the church purported to be giving you, but in a much less digestible form. Instead of these remote, crabbed biblical verses, you had contemporary people acting out moral dilemmas. Just the grace, the grace of those stars - not just the dancing stars, but the way they all moved with a certain grace. All that sank deep into my head, and my soul. View quote
John Updike