Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Legal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ching-kuo, the fire planet.

— John Updike

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief.

— John Updike

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

— John Updike

Mozart's music gives us permission to live.

— John Updike

My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

— John Updike

No act is so private it does not seek applause.

— John Updike

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.

— John Updike

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

— John Updike

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

— John Updike

Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.

— John Updike