"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. — 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
I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it… — John Updike Copy Share Image
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts… — 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
