John Updike Quotes

A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it - which inevitably amounts to explaining oneself - one has to try to love the object of one's attention a little bit less.

I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.

I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.

Being in love is one of the most powerful experiences anyone can have. I think that's why we have crushes when we're younger. Maybe it's how we get ready for real love.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.

The real problem has to do with the inability by people to admit that a position they've held a long time might be wrong. That's all. Not that it is. Just that it might be. I don't know why it is, but we tend to fall in love with things we believe, Threaten them, and you threaten us.

I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

This love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman.

Infatuation's just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person- that's when they become real

We need to recognize that although terrorism is real, there are many other dangers out there. And terrorism should not be the only driver or necessarily the leading driver of our foreign policy and especially of our domestic politics.

I need to feel like I'm part of something. I need to feel part of the world when I go to sleep.

The first love is the difficult love.

I might never ride Corr again. I don't know who I am without him.

A man needs a private life. With no ability to have a private life, one thing leads to another, and before you know it we have Bill and Monica. We need to get real about things. Humans are humans. Why should we expect more?

I really am a manifestation of my own fantasy.

It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but my own.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

If I went to someone for therapy, I wouldn't be a writer...I would just be well adjusted.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives that we need to make a large discount from their statements before we can come at their real meaning.

Amy Pond is, er...I've sort of fallen in love with Amy Pond.