When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but… — John Updike Copy Share Image
It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the… — 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
I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go.… — 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
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
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard… — 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
“I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. — 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
...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. — John Updike Copy Share Image
One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes… — 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
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
