John Updike on Knowledge

"He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better."

"Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile."

"Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know."

"In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself."

"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there."

"He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it."

"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."

"Women: you never know which side they want to dance on."

"You don't know what you don't know."

"Weeds don't know they're weeds."

"All this probing and grappling we must do, out in society: how much easier, Annabelle thinks, it is to stay in rooms you know as well as your own body, having a warm meal and an evening of television, where it's all so comfortably one-way."

"He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better."

"Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."