John Updike on Philosophy

"Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you."

"He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials..."

"Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals."

"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."

"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."

"There's more to being a human being than having your own way."

"Just not being senile is considered great down here."

"...We're too old to keep being foolish."

"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 overanimation. One can either see or be seen."

"Nelson wonders why, no matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong – you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."