John Updike

“For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.”

“Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as h...”

“There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.”

“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

“I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.”

“In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.”

“New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.”

“I have never liked haircuts.”

“Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be o...”

“Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.”

“Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.”

“My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.”

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

“In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.”

“Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.”

“Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.”

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

“The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

“We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.”

“In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.”