For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do -- they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
John Updike
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
John Updike
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ''somebody,'' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.
John Updike
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
John Updike
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
John Updike
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John Updike
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
It rots a writer's brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you're well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician.
John Updike
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John Updike
Graduation Quotes
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Inspirational Quotes
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.