My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. — John Updike Copy Share Image
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. — John Updike Copy Share Image
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. — John Updike Copy Share Image
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want… — John Updike Copy Share Image
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know.… — 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
