โฆhe is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people Iโm outside or is it all America?
John UpdikeI'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.
John UpdikeWhat would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us.
John UpdikePhyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...'
John UpdikeItโs spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sodโ Small letters sent To her from God.
John UpdikeWriting criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John UpdikeA 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.
John UpdikeWhen I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.
John UpdikeHistory. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John UpdikeWhen you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti หees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys
John UpdikeWriters take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John UpdikeI write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.
John UpdikeHaving children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John UpdikeGovernment is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John UpdikeI must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John UpdikeMy only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John UpdikeFour 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.
John UpdikeI moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either.
John UpdikeIt's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.
John UpdikeWhat is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John UpdikeI think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also.
John UpdikeUnlike 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.
John UpdikeThe literary scene is a kind of Medusaโs raft, small and sinking, and oneโs instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John UpdikeAn old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.
John UpdikeI really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
John UpdikeWe are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John UpdikeAs 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.
John UpdikeWhen I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John UpdikeThe crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.
John UpdikeBut it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John UpdikeWriting fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
John UpdikeI was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
John UpdikeLet us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.
John UpdikeI would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
John Updike"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did.
John Updike