Your first responsibility is to yourself and to your own goodness of heart.

I think people have come to expect that in artistic representation; that every work of art should be a work of extravagant hope.

I started out in engineering. I was a geophysical engineer. Throughout the course of my life I've done a lot of strange jobs, and the effect has been to make me think a little more skeptically about our capitalist society.

Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.

I hear that in my head all the time now: 'Why don't you go and see?'.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.

A John Updike is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, if that generation is lucky: so comfortable in so many genres, the same lively, generous intelligence suffusing all he did.