“What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?”
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
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John Updike 240
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009Related quotes
Shi Zhengli (2020) cited in " Coronavirus: Experts dismiss conspiracies blaming Wuhan Institute of Virology for outbreak https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2020/01/coronavirus-experts-dismiss-conspiracies-blaming-wuhan-institute-of-virology-for-outbreak.html" on Newshub, 30 January 2020.
'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)
Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 150

From the esplanade wall at Oenoanda, now in Turkey, as recorded by Diogenes of Oenoanda

Body Politic, June 1983, reported in Ann Silversides, AIDS activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community (2003), p. 32.

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”
Source: 'Salem's Lot

Praelectiones (Lectures, 1744) quoted in Larson (1967:317)


“All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.”