760 Quotes by John Updike

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

Phyllis 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...'

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.