Explore Quotes by John Updike

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

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

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

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

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.

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

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

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

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.

I have never liked haircuts.