John Updike
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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 one.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
I have never liked haircuts.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
I'm a dull person.
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
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.
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
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.
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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, and necessity.
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
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.
I like short stories.
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
Gods don't answer letters.
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.
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 miracles of creation and consciousness.
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.