760 Quotes by John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

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

I 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.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.