I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — John Updike Copy Share Image
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. — 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
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or… — 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
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and,… — 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
My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha… — 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
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
“Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward… — 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
“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 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
“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
Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence… — 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
“They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. — 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
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. — 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
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
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
“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
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
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
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway. — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
![“The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.” quote by John Updike](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/03e/john-updike-396_agreement_the-illusion-is-an-agreement-between-the_2135947.jpg)
