New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. — John Updike Copy Share Image
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. — John Updike Copy Share Image
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not… — John Updike Copy Share Image
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. — John Updike Copy Share Image
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body… — John Updike Copy Share Image
An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York,… — 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
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
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
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
“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
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
“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
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike Copy Share
“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the… — John Updike Copy Share
