But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. – John Updike
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow – and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
When you sit at your desk, if you’re lucky, there’s a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with ‘The Waste Land,’ I opened their copy of ‘Ulysses.’ The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. – John Updike
I know more about what it’s like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I’m a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word ‘wisdom’ has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I’m a little wiser. – John Updike
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, ‘Hey, I’m a professional writer now.’ – John Updike
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
Golf’s ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand – not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. – John Updike
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. – John Updike
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. – John Updike
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. – John Updike
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. – John Updike
