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Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. By John Updike Airport Rabbit Pru Southwest Florida

I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name"Though authors are a dreadful clanTo be avoided if you can,I'd like to meet the Indian,M. Anantanarayanan.I picture him as short and tan.We'd meet, perhaps, in Hindustan.I'd say, with admirable elan ,"Ah, Anantanarayanan --I've heard of you. The Times once ranA notice on your novel, anUnusual tale of God and Man."And AnantanarayananWould seat me on a lush divanAnd read his name -- that sumptuous spanOf 'a's and 'n's more lovely than"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan" --Aloud to me all day. I planHenceforth to be an ardent fanof Anantanarayanan --M. Anantanarayanan. By John Updike Anantanarayanan Book Missed Meet Read

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. By John Updike Lens Magnified Memory Telephoto Objects

Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time. By John Updike Intent Prayer Time Dumb Girl

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct. By John Updike Strips Girlie Operas Hear Government

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. By John Updike Models Beautiful Books Life Language

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. By John Updike Years Authorship Interview Asked Give

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown. By John Updike Maple Departed Leaves Stripped Shapely

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. By John Updike Funds Patron Host Anonymous Citizens

The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. By John Updike Goodnatured Good Meters Knew Standing

Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life's singularity - the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance. By John Updike Life Chance Terrifies Singularity Tragedy

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. By John Updike Books Freight Boxes Movers Moved

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads. By John Updike Momentarily Lust Drained Stares Remembered

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire. By John Updike Understood Hearth Secretly Primitive Appeal

I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we've been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you're morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You're not even interesting enough to make me sick. By John Updike Positive Life Unattractive Man Met

The beast is dry and mottled, shedding skinas minutes drop from life, a wristy pieceof dogged ugliness, its labors meantto carve from language beauty, that beauty whichlifts free of flesh to find itself in print By John Updike Mottled Shedding Life Ugliness Print

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 little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong. By John Updike Paterson American Silk City Virgin

Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back. By John Updike Elaborate Purpose World Life Love

One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with. By John Updike Lincoln Abe Republicans Democratic Presidential

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing. By John Updike Binary Picture Existence Antimatter Vanish

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. By John Updike Faith State Examined Binary Pole

When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid. By John Updike Power Trusted Found Personally Delusion

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays ... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it. By John Updike General Churches Visited Weekdays God

The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms. Now, By John Updike Simplicity Selfdestined Rid Giving God

Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. By John Updike Rabbit Flag Tear Attention Ball

He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red flame shadowed in black like you see on TV all the time, and he is shocked to find within himself, imagining this, not much emotion, just a cold thrill at being a witness, a kind of bleak wonder at the fury of chemicals, and relief that he hadn't been on the plane himself but was instead safe on this side of the glass, with his faint pronged sense of doom. By John Updike Plane Ignited Glints Time Imagining

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each one of us a special talent." Janice and Rabbit become unnaturally still; both are Christians. God's name makes them feel guilty. "God wants some of us to become scientists, some of us to become artists, some of us to become firemen and doctors and trapeze artists. And He gives to each of us the special talents to become these things, provided we work to develop them. We must work, boys and girls. So: Know Thyself. Learn to understand your talents, and then work to develop them. That's the way to be happy. By John Updike Thyself Greek God Work Wise

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything By John Updike Wanting Brought Things World Big

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. By John Updike Lovers Holding Car Dark Hands

In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedythe blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem. By John Updike Purifying Sweep Atheism Human Lost

Saying Goodbye to Very Young ChildrenThey will not be the same next time. The sayingsso cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged inthe more securely to the worldly buzzof television, alphabet, and street talk,culture polluting their gazes' dawn blue.It makes you see at last the value ofthose boring aunts and neighbors (their smellsof summer sweat and cigarettes, their faceslike shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)who knew you from the start, when you were zero,cooing their nothings before you could be boredor knew a name, not even you own, or howthis world brave with hellos turns all goodbye. By John Updike Young Goodbye Time Childrenthey Knew

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago. By John Updike Older Selectively Ago Childhood Accessible

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. By John Updike Church Cinema Spiritual Life Christian

In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves. By John Updike Hot Latitude Temperature Flirted Hundred

We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing what they see and being asked to cure it. Blood and vomit and pus do not revolt them; senility and dementia have no terrors; it does not alarm them to plunge into the slippery tangle of internal organs, or to handle the infected and contagious. For them, the flesh and its diseases have been abstracted, rendered coolly diagrammatic and quickly subject to infallible diagnosis and effective treatment. The House of God is a book to relieve you of these illusions; it ... displays it as farce, a melee of blunderers laboring to murky purpose under corrupt and platitudinous superiors. By John Updike Doctors Expect World Trepidation Uncertainty

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken. By John Updike Noticed Harry Jesus Rabbit Richer

...Without death, now, there couldn't be life. Health," he said with a little smiling roll of his lower lip, "is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking. It strains the spine and the nerves. It makes tension and the brain makes the body. By John Updike Death Life Brain Health Makes

Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year. By John Updike Green Georgia Grass Grandstands Stalls

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle. By John Updike Thing Glue Print Beauty Book

The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods. By John Updike Mind Fall Long Watches Asleep

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. By John Updike Writers Encourage Young Motto Silent

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler. By John Updike Work America Forgotten Loveliness Overpasses

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up. By John Updike Bodies Sexuality Women Forgiveness Mythologizing

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did. By John Updike Hit Hand Heard Brusquely Grip

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool. By John Updike Florence Schrack English Grade School

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? By John Updike Nature Genes Arise Amid Mate

An American in London ... cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure. By John Updike London American Washington York Boston

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy. By John Updike Thought Child Artist Brings World

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it. By John Updike Nelson Slim Queer Supposed Pepsi

Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. By John Updike Suspect Moment Thief Tiptoeing Brings

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline. By John Updike History Live Decline Memorize Empires

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. By John Updike Cart Congruences Arabesques Prepared Delicate

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. By John Updike Park Boston Fenway Ballpark Lyric

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn't know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow. By John Updike End Factory Road Field Empty

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. By John Updike Habits Life Write Hour Day

Martyrs of a sort they were, these children, along with the town drunk, in his basketball sneakers and buttonless overcoat, draining blackberry brandy from a paper bag as he sat on his bench in Kazmierczak Square, risking nightly death by exposure; martyrs too of a sort were the men and women hastening to adulterous trysts, risking disgrace and divorce for their fix of motel love - all sacrificing the outer world to the inner, proclaiming with this priority that everything solid-seeming and substantial is in fact a dream, of less account than a merciful rush of feeling. By John Updike Martyrs Risking Sort Square Kazmierczak

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. By John Updike Hands Learn World Reverently Clay

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven By John Updike Heaven Souls Cry Awaken Tiny

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. By John Updike Beckett Kafka Eliot Admire Prolific

What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd. By John Updike Connor Face Fing Pry Stinking

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. By John Updike Time Antibodies Unvaccinated Suspicion Lateness

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving ... ' By John Updike Math Phyllis Beautiful Explained Give

I never heard enough damnation from your pulpit. Many mornings I had to strain to take hold of what you were saying, Reverend. I couldn't figure it out, and got dizzy listening, the way you were dodging here and there. A lot of talk about compassion for the less fortunate, I remember that. Never a healthy sign, to my way of thinking, too much fuss and feathers about the poor. They're with us always, the Lord Himself said. Wait till the next go-around, if the poor feel so sorry for themselves on this. The first shall be last. Take away damnation, in my opinion, a man might as well be an atheist. A God that can't damn a body to an eternal Hell can't lift a body up out of the grave either. By John Updike Pulpit Heard Reverend Poor Damnation

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other. By John Updike Shore Outings Poor Ending Upset

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. By John Updike Moment Finished Truth Culmination Minutes

I tend to lose them. The manuscripts. I remember myself as an aspiring writer, and you know, I never did this. I assumed that published writers had worked at it until they became worth publishing, and I assumed that that's the only way to do it, and I'm a little puzzled by young men who write me charming letters suggesting that I conduct an impromptu writing course. Evidently, I've become part of the Establishment that's expected to serve youth - like college presidents and the police. I'm still trying to educate myself. I want to read only what will help me unpack my own bag. By John Updike Tend Lose Assumed Manuscripts Establishment

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it. By John Updike Things Made Feel Feeling Early

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. By John Updike Sickly Insides Beginning Feel Fill

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko's hovering panels or Barnett Newman's stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. ... The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved. By John Updike Rothko Barnett Newman Whistler Abstraction

Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel. By John Updike Spring Depressing People Find Fall

Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family talk when both know that what she wants to discuss is her old issue, that flared up a minute ago, of whether he loves her or not, or why at least he doesn't need her as much as she does him. But their relationship at the start was established with her in pursuit of him, and all the years since, of hidden meetings, of wise decisions to end it and thrilling abject collapses back into sex, have not disrupted the fundamental pattern of her giving and his taking, of her fearing their end more than he, and clinging, and disliking herself for clinging, and wanting to punish him for her dislike, and him shrugging and continuing to bask in the sun of her love, that rises every day whether he is there or not. He can't believe it, quite, and has to keep testing her. By John Updike Harry Heard Clinging End Thelma

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter. By John Updike Eye Translation Skims Utterly Delicate

All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues, since Philadelphia played, haplessly, in both. How precious each scrap of the world appears, in our first years' experience of it! Slowly we realize that it is all disposable, including ourselves. By John Updike Saving Child Haplessly Philadelphia Season

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. By John Updike Victim Control Work Accidents Creative

Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot. By John Updike Lambert God American Carnegie Mellon

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. By John Updike Government Madness Shading Organized Benevolence

You were never in Texas," she says.He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was.""Doing what?""Serving Uncle.""Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army.""You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero. By John Updike Absolutely Serving Uncle Army Texas

The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. By John Updike Nittygritty Details Happening Physicists Pared

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments. By John Updike Baseball Fun Greatcoats Sport Disappointments

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition. By John Updike Lot Complain Coping Quit Watch

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. By John Updike Fiction Moral Index Read Picked

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size. By John Updike Book Mine Size Feel Number

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 prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified. By John Updike Faith Afterlife Reason Ridicules Modestly

A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast. Piet was moved, beholding his daughter launched intoanother dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thornes had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Piet saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever." John Updike, Couples, 1968. By John Updike Judy Nancy Caught Showed Ladybugs

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. By John Updike Sex Ages Priests Boyish Spinsters

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead. By John Updike Thing Mature Dead Telling Cry

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny. By John Updike Lover Anew Nice Things Makes

For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class. By John Updike Nelson Nutburger Lemony Light Jill

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. By John Updike Century Mars Major Syrtis Telescopes

If Rabbit knew a way to clone an adult sized vagina, Rabbit would clone it, have sex with it, then clone an arm to the side of that vagina so he could carry it with him everywhere he went like a big, fuzzy key chain. By John Updike Rabbit Clone Big Fuzzy Chain

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight. By John Updike Make Instructions Great Charm Worth

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. By John Updike Awe Books Brains Longer Conditioned

Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. By John Updike Joe Marino Ago Bed Plans

... he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [ ... ] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? By John Updike America Eyes Shore Customers Unlike

When he was about twelve or thirteen he walked into his parents' bedroom in the half-house on Jackson Road not expecting his father to be there, and the old man was standing in front of his bureau in just socks and an undershirt, innocently fishing in a drawer for his undershorts, that boxer style that always looked sad and dreary to Harry anyway, and here was his father's bare behind, such white buttocks, limp and hairless, mute and helpless flesh that squeezed out shit once a day and otherwise hung there in the world like linen that hadn't been ironed ... By John Updike Father Jackson Road Harry Undershirt

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee. By John Updike Nothingness Skit Visitors Track Feeling

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it. By John Updike Matter Period Longer Death Concentrated

Of course, there is a little more to it than that. We of the frailer sex have to have some wild hope, something to go to otherwise a million years of slavery has conditioned us to huddle by the hearth, stony as it is, and pound some more millet, and get pounded in turn by way of thanks, and commune with the moon. I speak as one of my generation, that came of age just as the Fifties ended I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down. By John Updike Fifties Lee Harvey Oswald Hope

Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the "fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage" of the "'historic' novel. By John Updike Jewett Historic Buchanan Seventies Henry

It's spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod - Small letters sent To her from God. By John Updike Spring Small God Farewell Colds

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. By John Updike Narrative Painted Exit Opens Room

At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins. By John Updike Goblins Hags Small Witches Pins

A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. By John Updike Height Small Hair Woman Bent

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. By John Updike Englanders Dear Absolutes Pleasing Soil

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable. By John Updike Putting Cup Enormous Negligeable Sad

As all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality. By John Updike Maker Yard Drive Souls Equal

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were ... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God. By John Updike God Christianity Rainbow Services Pass

I drive my car to supermarket,The way I take is superhigh,A superlot is where I park it,And Super Suds are what I buy.Supersalesmen sell me tonic -Super-Tone-O, for Relief.The planes I ride are supersonic.In trains, I like the Super Chief.Supercilious men and womenCall me superficial - me,Who so superbly learned to swim inSupercolossality.Superphosphate-fed foods feed me;Superservice keeps me new.Who would dare to supersede me,Super-super-superwho? By John Updike Super Superservice Suds Tonic Trains

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals. By John Updike Thing Happiness Static Sacrifices Losses

Television was soon to eclipse print's inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch. By John Updike Television Electrons Pulling Couch Eclipse

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider ... I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind. By John Updike Hate Outsider Home Family Town

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze. By John Updike Peel Chalk Breezes Taste Apple

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. By John Updike Arising Essential Support Encouragement Mad

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes? By John Updike Turning Explodes Planet Bored

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. By John Updike Books Bodies Externalise Brains Turn

Though old himself, he disliked old men. By John Updike Men Disliked

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. By John Updike Smaller Breadbox Bigger Remote Nestling

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. By John Updike Americans Newness Conditioned Respect Costs

Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. By John Updike Unedited Web Inaccurate Unattributed Juvenile

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? By John Updike Position Repulsions Atheism Drastic Uninterestingness

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. By John Updike Activity Creative Doer Cares

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. By John Updike Selfconsciousness Scorned Interestedness Outward Writer

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. By John Updike Bottles Write Ads Deodorants Labels

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. By John Updike Head Write Books Unlock Traffic

I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights, not to think about politics. By John Updike Rabbit Politics Goddam American Precious

Writers' lives break into two halves, By John Updike Writers Halves Lives Break

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. By John Updike England Past Moved Partly Real

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. By John Updike Religion Spaces Good Story Enter

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. By John Updike Existence Horrible Ecstasy Experience Feel

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life. By John Updike Circumstance Perversity Life Heart Prefers

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? By John Updike Cease Appetite Days

Nature refuses to rest. By John Updike Nature Rest Refuses

Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree? By John Updike God Tree Waterfall

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. By John Updike Change Customs Respectable Admit Art

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. By John Updike Reread Poetry Tend Write Quickest

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. By John Updike Desk Lucky Skin Sit Moment

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other. By John Updike Essence Thought Interest Humanities Study

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. By John Updike Moments Tunnel Jam Doubt Lots

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. By John Updike House Furnished Body Fiction Willfully

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. By John Updike Hobbies Glue Place Cellar Smell

But cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. By John Updike People Sea Cities Live Reason

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. By John Updike Love Government Extent Leaves

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. By John Updike Museums Feel Lots Places Play

People are incorrigibly themselves. By John Updike People Incorrigibly

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea. By John Updike Circumstantial Reality Facts Letters Thorns

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. By John Updike School Parents Industry

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. By John Updike Art Shoes Baby Gold Worn

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. By John Updike Public Year Give Book

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world. By John Updike Throat Strange Erotic Emphasis Pillar

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. By John Updike Roth Oedipal Philip Noticed Begins

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. By John Updike Price Guts People Pay

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. By John Updike Thirty Lots

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. By John Updike York Complaint Year Condition Necessity

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. By John Updike Madness True Eunuch War Sex

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation. By John Updike Creation Atrocity Emperor Things Thrive

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another. By John Updike Revolution Crowd Taking Power

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. By John Updike Wanting Opposition Pairing Words Transition

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age? By John Updike George Bush President Allegiance Talked

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. By John Updike Muse Poetry Ago Time Recourt

Growth is betrayal. By John Updike Growth Betrayal

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. By John Updike True Extinction Miss Predict Worst

How many more, I must ask myself,such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness? By John Updike Augusts Witness Myselfsuch Perfect Ends

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia. By John Updike Remember Siberia Hint Freezes Muttered

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. By John Updike Collins Billy Poems Writes Lovely

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination. By John Updike Florida Illumination Sun Single Thing

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours. By John Updike Bankruptcy State Obscene Spiritualism Condition

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. By John Updike Days Pale Nights Blend Alike

I don't think women are dumb. By John Updike Dumb Women

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. By John Updike Landscape Told Enjoy Properly Grim

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. By John Updike Delicate Prayers Exhortations Visualizations Rubble

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards. By John Updike Men Bastards Lose Wonderful People

The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything - dead meat, living meat, old bones - By John Updike Brain Brontosaurus Thirtyton Body Twoounce

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. By John Updike Man Crystallization Poem Young Bring

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. By John Updike America Live Made Choice Aware

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. By John Updike Rain Grace Earth Life Sky

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood. By John Updike Harry Nelson Rabbit House Brain

Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, 'I'm God,' I'd say, 'Show me your badge. By John Updike Middleaged Ideas God Show Tired

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving ... By John Updike Unnecessary Chance Failure Producing Totally

There always comes in September a parched brightness to the air that hits Rabbit two ways, smelling of apples and blackboard dust and marking the return to school and work in earnest, but then again reminding him he's suffered another promotion, taken another step up the stairs that has darkness at the head. By John Updike September Rabbit Smelling Earnest Promotion

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars. By John Updike David Warning Death Ground Body

It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere. By John Updike Growth Betrayal Route Arriving Leaving

Rabbit realised the world was not solid and benign, it was a shabby set of temporary arrangements rigged up for the time being, all for the sake of money. You just passed through, and they milked you for what you were worth, mostly when you were young and gullible. By John Updike Rabbit Benign Money Realised World

The clangor of the body shop comes up softly. It's noise comforts him, tells him he is hidden and safe, that while he hides men are busy nailing the world down, and toward the disembodied sounds his heart makes in darkness a motion of love. By John Updike Softly Clangor Body Shop Safe

Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard. By John Updike Golf Dream Simply Played Stairways

He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door By John Updike Feel Good Vacation Weather Year

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. By John Updike America Reagan Haven Turned Tax

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence. By John Updike Electricity Grackles Sentence Single Strand

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. By John Updike Square Harvard College Marveled Wealth

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. By John Updike Wars Songs Impossibilities Generationthe Attitudes

From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another. By John Updike Paper Craft Printing Earliest Childhood

Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within the flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen. By John Updike Doubt Fellow Splendid Legs Autumn

Evening Concert, Sainte-Chapelle The celebrated windows flamed with lightdirectly pouring north across the Seine;we rustled into place. Then violinsvaunting Vivaldi's strident strength, then Brahms,seemed to suck with their passionate sweetness,bit by bit, the vigor from the red,the blazing blue, so that the listening eyesaw suddenly the thick black lines, in shapesof shield and cross and strut and brace, that heldthe holy glowing fantasy together.The music surged; the glow became a milk,a whisper to the eye, a glimmer ebbeduntil our beating hearts, our violinswere cased in thin but solid sheets of lead. By John Updike Concert Seine Evening Saintechapelle Place

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. By John Updike Tennis Forehand Backhand Volley Grip

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it. By John Updike Life Nacho Squishyyucky Yummycrunchy Depends

Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. By John Updike Writers Reader Words Professional Class

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. By John Updike Chilled Paper Morning Characters Greet

Writing ... is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world - it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one's pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light - in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it - approaches blasphemy. By John Updike Unbearable Addiction Release Reality Writing

Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life. By John Updike Life Meet Heaven Start End

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. By John Updike Narrative Humanism Single Simple Lead

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up. By John Updike Twist Ipswich Years Component Tests

Music affected him as women's talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener. By John Updike Music Affected Women Talking Interceding

I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature. By John Updike Choke Score Veins Temperature Splinterthin

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. By John Updike Fiction Rarely Poem Fully Feel

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting. By John Updike Sins Uncoordination Evil Order Connecting

One world: everybody fucks everybody. When he thinks of all the fucking there's been in the world and all the fucking there's going to be, and none of it for him, here he sits in this stuffy car dying, his heart just sinks. He'll never fuck anybody again in his lifetime except poor Janice Springer, he sees this possibility ahead of him straight and grim as the known road. By John Updike Fucking World Springer Janice Dying

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. By John Updike Mars Imagination Long Exerted Pull

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing. By John Updike Carnivore Shy Brutal Facts Meat

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it. By John Updike Case Feel Professional Freedom Speech

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. "You have it pretty good. By John Updike Weight Face Close Temples Built

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. By John Updike Ensures Happiness Pursuit Guarantee Individual

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. By John Updike Footnotes Copenhagen Subheads Epigraphs Crippled

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. By John Updike Money Bucket Drip Water Leaky

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 to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. By John Updike World Perpetuate Shutting Thought Fact

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. By John Updike Parents Born Boyhood Tree Mother

Ken appeared, was taller than she, wanted her, was acceptable and accepted on all sides; similarly, nagging mathematical problems abruptly crack open. Foxy could find no fault with him, and this challenged her, touched off her stubborn defiant streak. She felt between his handsomeness and intelligence a contradiction that might develop into the convoluted humour of her Jew. Ken looked lika a rich boy and worked like a poor one. From Farmington, he was the only son of a Hartford laywer who never lost a case. Foxy came to imagine his birth as cool and painless, without a tear or outcry. Nothing puzzled him. There were unknowns, but no mysteries. ( ... ) He was better-looking, better-thinking, a better machine. By John Updike Similarly Appeared Wanted Sides Nagging

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. By John Updike Decay Radium Difficulty Swing Thoughts

Neutrinos, they are very small.They have no charge and have no massAnd do not interact at all.The earth is just a silly ballTo them, through which they simply pass,Like dustmaids down a drafty hallOr photons through a sheet of glass.They snub the most exquisite gas,Ignore the most substantial wall,Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,Insult the stallion in his stall,And, scorning barriers of class,Infiltrate you and me. Like tallAnd painless guillotines they fallDown through our heads into the grass.At night, they enter at NepalAnd pierce the lover and his lassFrom underneath the bed - you callIt wonderful; I call it crass. By John Updike Neutrinos Stalland Scorning Smallthey Charge

The reel of your real life unwound only once. By John Updike Reel Real Life Unwound

A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body. By John Updike Lies Zones Superstition Spine Woman

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. By John Updike York Shillington Capri Special Consciousness

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. By John Updike Memories Impressions Years Material Resonant

Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess's cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that's used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death. By John Updike Stops Inside Upstairs Kind Met

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. By John Updike Ordinary Time Plot Aesthetically Banal

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. By John Updike Frantic Branches Pulpy Paper Broke

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. By John Updike Firstrate Basketball Played Secondrate Matter

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? By John Updike Chance Tragedy Decisive Difference Comedy

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. By John Updike Hand Aesthetic Misstep Make Viewer

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. By John Updike General Writer Stories Passages Difficult

No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into. By John Updike Wrong Air Matter Cheerful Blameless

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. By John Updike Betrayal Life Love Flatters Armed

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go. By John Updike Antarctic Golf Camaraderie Explorers Transcendence

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself. By John Updike Doris Day Insights Real Stuck

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees. By John Updike Fifty Sport Holds Man Woman

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us. By John Updike Natural Sad Beauty Essentially Temporary

When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads ... But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. By John Updike Oriental Heads Blooms Single Big

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. By John Updike God Chaos Body Devil Order

What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings. By John Updike Glass Meanings Sensation Touching Talking

This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and do not transcend the limits of their age, but, working within the times, bring what is peculiar to the moment to glory. We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic.... Whatever the many failings of my work, let it stand as a manifesto of my love for the time in which I was born. By John Updike Shakespeare Milton Pope Age Men

You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together. By John Updike Dark Side Moon Back Wonderful

also on June 22nd JB vetoes the Homestead Bill ... This bill, which proposes to give him ("the honest poor man," ... ) land at an almost nominal price, out of the property of the government, will go far to demoralize the people and repress this noble spirit of independence. It may introduce among us those pernicious social theories which have proved so disastrous in other countries. By John Updike June Bill Homestead Vetoes Man

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was. By John Updike Hair Fuzz Scissors Cut Longgrown

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers. By John Updike Medusa Raft Small Sinking Fingers

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God By John Updike Harry God Disaster Puts Back

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. By John Updike York Nonparticipants Interfering Leaving Leave

Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor. By John Updike Born Poor Rich Harder

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also. By John Updike Sociologists People Truth Politicians Ministers

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't - whichever seems likelier to win an effect. By John Updike Whichever Effect Difficulty Humorists Mix

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. By John Updike Life Game Video End Matter

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. By John Updike Age Suppose Sequels Inevitable Writer

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. By John Updike Taste Room Polite Show Good

Heade's calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God's grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes. By John Updike Stormstirred Heade Unsteady Fearful Mood

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs - To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind. By John Updike Towns Mind Men Wild Wood

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store. By John Updike Glorious Man Days Art Praise

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. By John Updike Fiction Greedy Write Information Data

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind. By John Updike Unvisited Dead Hears Growing Wild

But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. By John Updike Mother Question Liking Separate People

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 atheist. By John Updike Englishman Equal Constitutional Obligation Men

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. By John Updike Keds March Wires Scrape Snap

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold. By John Updike Good Tours Promotion Sell Matters

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. By John Updike Alike Necessities Male Female Bodies

Mozart's music gives us permission to live. By John Updike Mozart Live Music Permission

He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons. By John Updike Reading Lost Appetite Afraid Overwhelmed

The books of the 1920s and '30s that are most inviting, with their handy size, generous margins, and sharp letterpress type. By John Updike Inviting Size Generous Margins Type

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. By John Updike Child Life Cartoons Pictures Book

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. By John Updike Mirror Feel Hands

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living. By John Updike Love Fated Exist Animals Birth

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. By John Updike Ulysses Greenwich Land Waste Emboldened

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. By John Updike Reviews Bad Remember Phrases

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat. By John Updike Provided World Clothes Food Impossibility

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form. By John Updike Reader Interested Imagine Pointless Storytelling

Back From Vacation""Back from vacation", the barber announces,or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.They are amazed to find the workaday worldstill in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,their customers having hardly missed them, andthere being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achievedin foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,the evidence says, though their hearts cry, "Not so! By John Updike Back Vacation Customs Postman Drugstore

Make no mistake: if he rose at allIt was as His body;If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,The amino acids rekindle,The Church will fall. By John Updike Church Make Mistake Body Reverse

The fucking world is running out of gas. By John Updike Gas Fucking World Running

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature. By John Updike Low Slowly Stance Club Top

His silence he has indicated that he is willing. He hasn't the strength any more, the excess vitality, for an affair - its danger, its demand performances, the secrecy added like a filigree to your normal life, your gnawing preoccupation with it and with the constant threat of its being discovered and ended. By John Updike Silence Vitality Affair Danger Performances

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership. By John Updike Goodness Volunteers People Leader Madness

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. By John Updike Big Trees Height Bushes Puzzled

First snow: it came this year late in November. By John Updike November Snow Year Late

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. By John Updike Golf Activity Measured Pace Permits

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. By John Updike Dreams Man Human State Tension

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. By John Updike Gratuitous Art Cosmologists Universe Newwave

He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. By John Updike Dryroasted Cashews Settles Back Small

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. By John Updike Roof Massive Porchlessness Seventeenthcentury Recognized

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top. By John Updike John Updike Begins Improvements Beer

The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record. By John Updike Humble Dubious Record Fiction Writer

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. By John Updike Smoke Earth Hard Iron Lay

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do. By John Updike Judginess Business Openness Curiosity Proper

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share. By John Updike Alike Purr Stroked Motionless Computer

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. By John Updike Cowardly Reading Child Lazy Encountering

The universe is a pointless, self running machine, and we are insignificant by-products, whom death will tuck back into oblivion, with or without holy fanfare. By John Updike Pointless Machine Byproducts Oblivion Fanfare

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. By John Updike Dependable Professionalism Difficulty Predictable Boring

American art in general ... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. By John Updike American General Surrealism Art Puritan

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. By John Updike Artist Worse Live Struggling

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. By John Updike Bookstores Forts Spilling Sidewalk Lonely

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. By John Updike Closets Improvise Seventeenthcentury House Short

Tall as he is, there is no carrying the slope under his shirt as anything other than a loose gut, a paunch that in itself must weigh as much as a starving Ethiopian child. By John Updike Ethiopian Tall Gut Child Carrying

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. By John Updike Nature Perfect Disarmed Perspective Stretch

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. By John Updike Founding Fathers Parents Wisdom Decided

Irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it. By John Updike Irony Cake Appearing Eat

Hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him. By John Updike Forgiveness Hate Suits Immersed Paralyzed

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works. By John Updike Women Fire Crotch Begin Pricks

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe By John Updike Greatly Past Universe Sinned Juncture

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? By John Updike Die Conditional Death Day Altered

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain. By John Updike Learn Pain Joy

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. By John Updike Writing Fiction Truthtelling Selfexpression Consciousness

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly. By John Updike Nobly Live Fact Ease Feeling

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. By John Updike Shield Hiding Honey Write Kind

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. By John Updike Spies Infancy Shame Secrets Discovered

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. By John Updike Failure Authors Study Literature Threatens

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. By John Updike Dwarf Famous Writer Tall Normality

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. By John Updike Baseball Pitcher Fielder Skills Schizophrenically

He sounds to himself, saying this, like an impersonator; life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. By John Updike Life Impersonator Thought Grownup Sounds

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. By John Updike Boston Chinese Food Texas United

No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers. By John Updike Fiction Soul Locale Humble Site

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. By John Updike Ideal Heaven Invalidating Succeeds Marriage

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. By John Updike Behalf Content Obsessions Entertainers Artists

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. By John Updike Fiction Imaginary Events Dark People

Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet. By John Updike Remember Carpet Hair Gray Long

It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt. By John Updike Mystics Skirt Strange Thing Ecstasies

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. By John Updike Read Good Ending Dismisses Touch

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives. By John Updike Deathforeseeing Consciously Animal Human Tense

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts. By John Updike Flow Story Facts Kind Trickle

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise. By John Updike Gluttony Feat Exercise Athletic Stretching

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. By John Updike Imagine Sweating Worriedlooking Word Poem

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. By John Updike Manque Crispness Animation Writing Give

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers. By John Updike Exempt Time Poorhouse Felt Mendelssohn

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. By John Updike Kidding Yorker Sense True Secretly

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. By John Updike House Houses Americans America Seventeenthcentury

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy's idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city. By John Updike Oars Schmitt Eakins Tonally River

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. By John Updike Sea Writing Criticism Fiction Poetry

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display. By John Updike Spacewomen Raspberry Buttocks Display Running

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' By John Updike Time Mention Proofreading Lot Coming

Write him down, if he must write him down as something, as a disbeliever; he disbelieved in the Pope, in the Kremlin, in the Vietcong, in the American eagle, in astrology, Arthur Schlesinger, Eldridge Cleaver, Senator Eastland, and Eastman Kodak. Nor did he believe overmuch in his disbelief. He By John Updike Write Pope Kremlin Vietcong Arthur

A few places are especially conducive to inspiration - automobiles, church - public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church - little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday. By John Updike Automobiles Church Inspiration Public Places

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. By John Updike Centaur Farm House Fiction Molding

No act is so private it does not seek applause. By John Updike Applause Act Private Seek

Sunshine, the old clown, rims the room. By John Updike Sunshine Clown Rims Room

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. By John Updike Europe Inheritance Possession Bees Dwelling

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. By John Updike Realm Materialism Physical Conscience Sensation

I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floorboards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer's map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begining to suspect is the unsayable thing, and I grow frightened. By John Updike Made Feet Map Thing Frightened

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. By John Updike Sir Venomous States President United

We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! By John Updike Garden Eat Dinners Discuss Wives

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. By John Updike Years Relaxation Read Mystery Carr

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. By John Updike Love Madness Exploding Polls Rotting

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb. By John Updike God Lamb Tiger

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. By John Updike Revolutionary Populism Naked Approaches Barefoot

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. By John Updike Monstrous Convenience Beauty Awakened Hour

Let us not mock God with metaphor,Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages:Let us walk through the door. By John Updike Sidestepping Transcendence Making God Faded

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you. By John Updike Dancing Standing Place Letting Devil

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. By John Updike Wiser Stupid Forgetful Littler Dare

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started. By John Updike Started World Ending People Dumb

With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks By John Updike Speaks White Collar Forges God

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, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. By John Updike Chinese Arrives Food Texas Delicious

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. By John Updike Appealingness Attainability Inversely Proportional

Geography! That's something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography. By John Updike Geography Grade Teach Heard Grownup

Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know. By John Updike Thirtysix Started Years Difference

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty 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. By John Updike Beauty Game America Waiting Basketball

In no other sport must the spectator move. By John Updike Move Sport Spectator

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition. By John Updike Consciousness Substance Fictional Architecture Bricks

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone By John Updike Incorrigible Writers Disreputable Early Decay

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light. By John Updike Representation Evidence Made Photograph Presents

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction. By John Updike Writing Music Sense Momentum Fiction

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. By John Updike Terry States Pirates United Time

Death is easily fooled. If the churches don't work, a filter will do. By John Updike Death Fooled Easily Work Churches

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway. By John Updike Critic Mother Raise

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. By John Updike Critics Cart Pigs Pastry

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. By John Updike Vat Prints Rapes Rape Afterward

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. By John Updike Verse Biography Phrases Letters Odd

The great thing about the dead, they make space. By John Updike Dead Space Great Thing Make

The days are short,The sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and dark. By John Updike Dark Days Shortthe Sun Sparkhung

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. By John Updike Golf Enjoyment Relax Swales Hand

Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists. By John Updike Hope Fact Exists Bases Vast

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. By John Updike Things Golf Swing Suitcase Pack

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. By John Updike Prose Flow Weight Ear Forward

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. By John Updike Truth Forced Man Simply Manifest

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. By John Updike Depression Scraps Raised Great Sense

This got him to the door. There, ridiculously, he turned. It was only at the door, he decided in retrospect, that her conduct was quite in excusable: not only did she stand unncessarily close, but, by shifting the weight of her body to one leg and leaning her head sidewise, she lowered her height several inches, placing him in a dominating position exactly suited to the broad, passive shadows she must have known were on her face." ("Snowing in Greenwich Village") By John Updike Door Ridiculously Snowing Village Turned

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. By John Updike Sixty Currency Idea Elder Wisdom

The first breathe of adultery is the freest. By John Updike Freest Breathe Adultery

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. By John Updike Believed Wait Inspired Pleasures Writing

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. By John Updike Daily Bearings Extent Sociable Sane

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. By John Updike Salem Born Time Burned

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. By John Updike Birdie Hard Make Good Tee

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves. By John Updike England Crowd Raw Spirit Seek

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. By John Updike Christian Novelist Describe World

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. By John Updike America Happy Vast Conspiracy Make

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. By John Updike Figure Ago Told Long Time

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish. By John Updike Selfish Made Decision Life Hundred

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. By John Updike Things Clue

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. By John Updike Generation Set Shop Writer Hope

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer. By John Updike Longer Men Faithful Golf Partners

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. By John Updike Pga Woods Tiger Ease Afternoon

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page By John Updike Pleasures Style Page Surprises Surprising

Live. Live, brothers, though there be naught but shame and failure to furnish forth your living. By John Updike Live Brothers Living Naught Shame

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. By John Updike Pressed Explained Define Spirituality Shadow

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand. By John Updike Vulnerable Understand Gray Suit Makes

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life. By John Updike Smell Smoke Life Failure

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. By John Updike York Disaster City Virtually Habitable

A yawning repetitiveness as of a man who knows few words but will not stop talking. By John Updike Talking Yawning Repetitiveness Man Words

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. By John Updike Live Hold Families Living Compromise

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. By John Updike Reminiscence Oneself Selfparody Part Remaining

The rich - they just live in another realm, really. By John Updike Rich Realm Live

We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold. By John Updike Times Cold Wake Gallantest Flowers

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. By John Updike Life Coaster Roller Ups Fall

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. By John Updike Freest Constraints Develop Breath Adultery

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. By John Updike Category Terrorist Bugaboo Fellow Human

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. By John Updike Blinking Light Men Sharp Ghosts

Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors. By John Updike Careless Lucas Hay Felt