Explore Quotes by John Updike

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

My father taught only math.

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

I don't think women are dumb.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

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

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

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.