John Updike ,quotes

Imagine writing a poem with a...

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

A seventeenth-century house t...

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

My complaint, as an exile who...

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Reminiscence and self-parody ...

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

New York, like the Soviet Uni...

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Golf at its measured pace per...

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Baseball skills schizophrenic...

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

In my first 15 or 20 years of...

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Most Americans haven't had my...

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

I think you remember certain ...

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

New York is a city with virtu...

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Billy Collins writes lovely p...

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

I see no intrinsic reason why...

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

We are drawn to artists who t...

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

As movers and the moved both ...

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Old age treats freelance writ...

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

Smaller than a breadbox, bigg...

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

I seem most instinctively to ...

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

My wife and I had children wh...

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

My transition from wanting to...

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

John Updike 10.08.2025 21:06:28 387 quotes

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