760 Quotes by John Updike

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

Don’t you see, if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror.

Writing doesn’t require drive. It’s like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.

A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true.

Men, they were able to conjure it up immediately, that was one of their powers, that thunderous splashing as they stood lordly above the bowl. Everything about them was more direct, their insides weren’t the maze women’s were, for the pee to find its way through.