Quotes from John Updike

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

We shed skins in life, to keep living.

As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

Whatever men make, she says, what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn't know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.

How many more, I must ask myself, such perfect ends of Augusts will I witness?

No soul or locale is too humble to be the site of entertaining and instructive fiction. Indeed, all other things being equal, the rich and glamorous are less fertile ground than the poor and plain, and the dusty corners of the world more interesting than its glittering, already sufficiently publicized centers.