To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

— John Updike

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee.

— John Updike

We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

— John Updike

We are most alive when we're in love.

— John Updike

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe

— John Updike

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

— John Updike

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

— John Updike

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

— John Updike

What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ING chairs and make an f.ING collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.

— John Updike

While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the center and let life come to him — so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.

— John Updike