Quotes from John Updike

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.

Gods don't answer letters.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time.

Our lives fade behind us before we die.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

I have never liked haircuts.

I don't think women are dumb.