760 Quotes by John Updike

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

All blessings are mixed blessings.