Quotes from John Updike

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

In no other sport must the spectator move.

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

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.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?