760 Quotes by John Updike

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else

Writers’ lives break into two halves,

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.