John Updike

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.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

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.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

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

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.

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

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.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

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.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.