For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — John Updike Copy Share Image
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the… — John Updike Copy Share Image
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy… — John Updike Copy Share Image
You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike Copy Share
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl… — John Updike Copy Share
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our… — John Updike Copy Share
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike Copy Share
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug… — John Updike Copy Share
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications… — John Updike Copy Share
“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he… — John Updike Copy Share
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike Copy Share
“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the… — John Updike Copy Share
