John Updike

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.

Gods don't answer letters.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

I don't think women are dumb.

The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

All love comes from the family.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Living is a compromise between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

Dreams come true. Without that possibility nature would not incite us to have them.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

You cant change everything in one night but one night can change everything.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they dontwhichever seems likelier to win an effect.

In a way gluttony is an athletic feat a stretching exercise.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

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

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

Humor is my default mode.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

If you have the guts to be yourself other peoplell pay your price.

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.