The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves… — John Updike Copy Share Image
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. — John Updike Copy Share Image
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. — John Updike Copy Share Image
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. — 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
