“America teaches its children that every passion can be transmuted into an occasion to buy.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children… — John Updike Copy Share Image
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments… — 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
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability… — 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
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“All this saving a child does! At one point I even saved the box scores of an entire baseball season, both leagues,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“We weren’t idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with… — 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
“Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children" They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will… — 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… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and… — 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
