760 Quotes by John Updike

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

As 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.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was.