Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. — John Updike Copy Share Image
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
“Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. — 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 write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that… — 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
Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather… — 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
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in… — John Updike Copy Share Image
So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career 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
