In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and… — 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
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — John Updike Copy Share Image
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read.… — 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
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
