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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

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
Humans
Children
Members
Parents
Something
Ought
Think
Parent
Thinking
Race
Rather
Human

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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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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.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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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 take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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