A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability… — 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
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. — John Updike Copy Share Image
My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. — John Updike Copy Share Image
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather… — 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
