760 Quotes by John Updike

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

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

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.

I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.