760 Quotes by John Updike

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you’re 15, you tend to never lose it.

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.

Nothing feels worse than other people’s good times.

The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened.

I’m always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I’m stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

Music affected him as women’s talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

Mozart’s music gives us permission to live.

Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.