John Updike
I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.Collection: Work
Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out.Collection: Sex
I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.Collection: Party
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.Collection: Thinking
It’s spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod— Small letters sent To her from God.Collection: Spring
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.Collection: Religious
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.Collection: Art
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.Collection: Struggle
The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.Collection: Believe
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.Collection: Country
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.Collection: Self
It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.Collection: Men
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.Collection: Self
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.Collection: Atheist
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.Collection: Book
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.Collection: Betrayal
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.Collection: New York
The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.Collection: Mother
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.Collection: Christian
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?Collection: Sex
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.Collection: Architecture
The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.Collection: Cutting
The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.Collection: Children
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.Collection: Song
Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display.Collection: Running
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.Collection: Born
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.Collection: Pigs
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.Collection: Atheist
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.Collection: Exercise
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.Collection: Art
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.Collection: Cds
Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous.Collection: Ugly
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.Collection: Sex
Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.Collection: Easter
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.Collection: Feelings
I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself.Collection: Real
Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.Collection: Home
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.Collection: Land
A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.Collection: Kind
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.Collection: Gestures
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.Collection: Photography
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.Collection: Mean
...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.Collection: Hate
Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.Collection: Men
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.Collection: Writing
A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.Collection: Cat
Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.Collection: Government
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?Collection: Yesterday
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.Collection: New York