760 Quotes by John Updike

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

I 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.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.