John Updike quotes - page 4

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. (John Updike)
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. View quote
John Updike
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. View quote
John Updike
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. View quote
John Updike
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief,tiptoeing away withmore than it brings. View quote
John Updike
People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without sin, people aren't people any more, they're just soul-less sheep. View quote
John Updike
The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there. View quote
John Updike
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. View quote
John Updike
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. View quote
John Updike
[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up..." View quote
John Updike
...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same. (John Updike)
[Thelma] "...We're too old to keep being foolish." View quote
John Updike
The past is the past," Harry goes on, "you got to live in the present. ... It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning. View quote
John Updike
...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere. View quote
John Updike
Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water. View quote
John Updike
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. View quote
John Updike
All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way. View quote
John Updike
...If you could ever get the poor to vote in this country, you'd have socialism. But people want to think rich. That's the genius of the capitalist system: either you're rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be. View quote
John Updike
God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point. View quote
John Updike
Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent? View quote
John Updike
Well," his father says, "I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it. (John Updike)
[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." View quote
John Updike
..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up." View quote
John Updike
Like Ronnie said, we're alone. All we have is family, for what it's worth. View quote
John Updike
Weeds don't know they're weeds. View quote
John Updike