760 Quotes by John Updike

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

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.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

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.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

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.

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.

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.