That a marriage ends is less than ideal but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. – John Updike
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. – John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. – John Updike
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. – John Updike
Then your words of abuse today may turn into a universally valid principle of denigration, for words are magical formulae. They leave fingermarks behind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye becomes the footprints of history. One ought to watch one’s every word. – Franz Kafka, quoted by Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka