About John Updike: John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
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.
My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central ...
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston.
The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die.
Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door; be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a...
I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
We expect the world of doctors. Out of our own need, we revere them; we imagine that their training and expertise and saintly dedication have purged them of all the uncertainty, trepidation, and disgust that we would feel in their position, seeing wh...
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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 ...
