Books Quotes by John Updike

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

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

— John Updike

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

— John Updike

“Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.”

— John Updike

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something…

— John Updike

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal…

— John Updike

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes.…

— John Updike

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

— John Updike

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments…

— John Updike

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when…

— John Updike

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or…

— John Updike

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read.…

— John Updike

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was…

— John Updike

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

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a…

— John Updike

Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors…

— John Updike

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are…

— John Updike

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel…

— John Updike

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

“They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic…

— John Updike

“Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural…

— John Updike

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence…

— John Updike

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell…

— John Updike

“I Missed His Book, But I Read His Name" Though authors are a dreadful clan To be avoided if you can, I'd…

— John Updike

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and…

— John Updike

Authors should be honored only for their works.

— John Updike

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and…

— John Updike

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I…

— John Updike

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader…

— John Updike

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has…

— John Updike

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

— John Updike

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

— John Updike

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and…

— John Updike

A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy…

— John Updike

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