Quotes from John Updike

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.

I'm a dull person.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

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.