But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf,… — 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
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many… — 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
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me… — 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
