John Updike

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.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

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.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

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

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

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.