A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

— John Updike

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

— John Updike

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

— John Updike

A morning later, Nancy described her first dream, the first remembered dream of her life. She and Judy Thorne were on a screened porch, catching ladybugs. Judy caught one with one spot on its back and showed it to Nancy. Nancy caught one with two spots and showed it to Judy. Then Judy caught one with three spots and Nancy one with four. Because (the child explained) the dots showed how old the ladybugs were. She told this dream to her mother, who had her repeat it to her father at breakfast. Paid was moved, beholding his daughter launched into another dimension of life. Like school. He was touched by her tiny stock of imagery the screened porch (neither they nor the Thorne's had one; who?), the ladybugs (with turtles the most toylike of creatures), the mysterious power of numbers, that generates space and time. Paid saw down a long amplifying corridor of her dreams, and wanted to hear her tell them, to grow older with her, to shelter her forever.” John Updike, Couples, 1968.

— John Updike

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?

— John Updike

As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood.

— John Updike

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

— John Updike

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

— John Updike

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

— John Updike

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

— John Updike