Quotes from John Updike

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

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.

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 must deal with.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

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.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.