Explore Quotes by John Updike

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

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.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.