760 Quotes by John Updike

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

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.

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.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.