John Updike
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
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 he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
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.
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
Nature refuses to rest.
Belief, like love, must be voluntary.
In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.
Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
People are incorrigibly themselves.
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.
I don't think women are dumb.
All love comes from the family.
The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
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.
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
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 are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
My father taught only math.
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.
The rich - they just live in another realm, really.
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 Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
Authors should be honored only for their works.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
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.
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.Collection: People
I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.Collection: Baby