Quotes from John Updike

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

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God

With his white collar he forges god's name on every word he speaks

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.

What's beauty if it's not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

This life is the one to be lived now, that much is crystal-clear. What did Thoreau supposedly say—'One world at a time'?

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up.