760 Quotes by John Updike

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

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.

We hope the ""real"" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.

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.

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.

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.