About John Updike: John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
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.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
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.
In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
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.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy of a sort; one would hate to see this dandyism entirely squelched, whether by the analytic mills of the universities or by the scarcely le...
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
