We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.
John UpdikeLet us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.
John UpdikeMy only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John UpdikeWe take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike