John Updike

“It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.”

“A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.”

“For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.”

“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,...”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”

“A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.”

“My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that ar...”

“My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.”

“I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin mirac...”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.”

“Humor is my default mode.”

“Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.”

“Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

“A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.”

“Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.”

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.”