Quotes from John Updike

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

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

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

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.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

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.'

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

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.

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.

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.

She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ...

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

Humor is my default mode.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.