John Updike

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.