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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

John Updike

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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Sane
Extent
Daily
Others
Take
Great
Bearings
Sociable

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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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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.
John Updike