About John Updike: John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
The rich - they just live in another realm, really.
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.
Writing makes you more human.
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.
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.
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.
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.
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
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 p...
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.
It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
