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
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
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for… — 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
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
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want… — 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
