“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. — John Updike Copy Share Image
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. — John Updike Copy Share Image
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Intent on prayer, she has a dumb girl's sweet piercing way of putting her whole body into one thing at a time.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it… — John Updike Copy Share Image
What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? — John Updike Copy Share Image
I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on… — 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
“Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children" They will not be the same next time. The sayings so cute, just slightly off, will… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“This age needs rather men like Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pope; men who are filled with the strength of their cultures and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. — John Updike Copy Share Image
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. — 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 writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the… — 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
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts… — 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
