John Updike

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."

"Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago."

"Now nuns have blended into everybody else or else faded away. Vocations drying up, nobody wants to be selfless any more, everybody wants their fun. No more nuns, no more rabbis. No more good people, w…"

"What held him back all day was the feeling that somewhere there was something better for him than listening to babies cry and cheating people in used-car lots and it's this feeling he tries to kill, r…"

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

"Young people now most interesting," he decides to say. ""Not scared of starving as through most human history. Not scared of atom bomb as until recently. But scared of something – not happy. In Japan,…"

"All men are boys time is trying to outsmart."

"I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spi…"