John Updike

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the soul's very life.

He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Existence itself does not feel horrible it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

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

We are most alive when we're in love.

Sex is like money only too much is enough.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

I secretly understood the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

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.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.