John Updike
Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.Collection: Dream
In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.Collection: Memories
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.Collection: Want
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.Collection: Selfish
God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.Collection: God
I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature.Collection: Running
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.Collection: Basketball
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.Collection: Doors
We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.Collection: Suicide
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.Collection: Love
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.Collection: Wickedness
An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.Collection: Drinking
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.Collection: Life
Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.Collection: Sports
The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Morning
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.Collection: Emotional
I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.Collection: Zero
I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.Collection: Jobs
In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.Collection: Religion
The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.Collection: Golf
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.Collection: Green World
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.Collection: Race
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.Collection: Animal
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.Collection: Lying
There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.Collection: Sports
To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.Collection: Animal
In no other sport must the spectator move.Collection: Sports
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.Collection: Wisdom
The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.Collection: Golf
Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.Collection: Sea
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.Collection: Firsts
You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.Collection: Education
Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God.Collection: Rainbow
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.Collection: Women
Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing.Collection: Zero
Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.Collection: Debt
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun’s just started.Collection: Fun
Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it.Collection: Country
Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.Collection: Country
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.Collection: Firsts
It’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.Collection: Stories
One of the cool, chaste countries – Canada or Sweden.Collection: Country