Explore Quotes by John Updike

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

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

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

I like short stories.

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

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Gods don't answer letters.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.