My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living… — John Updike Copy Share Image
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. — John Updike Copy Share Image
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and… — 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
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the… — 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
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. — John Updike Copy Share Image
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. — 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
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that… — 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
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
