760 Quotes by John Updike

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

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.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

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.

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

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.