Quotes from John Updike

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. I am a paid keeper of societies unusables - the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant.

We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.

In a way, gluttony is an athletic feat, a stretching exercise.

To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my life, is the reason why I write.

Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time.

Weeds don't know they're weeds.

I think "taste" is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order.

Live. Live, brothers, though there be naught but shame and failure to furnish forth your living.

Why is the world so elaborate, if it has no purpose? Think of the care that goes into the least little insect and weed around us. You say you love me; then you must love life. Life is a gift, for which we must give something back.

You were never in Texas," she says.He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was.""Doing what?""Serving Uncle.""Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army.""You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero.