John Updike

He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.

"Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died."

You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.

"The past is the past," Harry goes on, "you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning."

Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.

College is a rip-off, the professors are teaching you stuff because they’re getting paid to do it, not because it does you any good. They don’t give a fuck about geography or whatever any more than you do. It’s all phony, they’re there because parents don’t want their kids around the house past a certain age and sending them to college makes them look good. ‘My little Johnny’s at Haavahd.’

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.

The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.

His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.