Explore Quotes by John Updike

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

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.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

Humor is my default mode.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

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

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

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

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

I'm a dull person.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.