Quotes from John Updike

My father taught only math.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

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's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

I like short stories.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

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.

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 don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.

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

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

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.

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.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

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.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.