“The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinions and even into… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway. — John Updike Copy Share Image
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. — 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
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. — 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
The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter. — John Updike Copy Share Image
...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her… — John Updike Copy Share Image
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that… — John Updike Copy Share Image
You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. — John Updike Copy Share Image
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped… — 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
