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" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "

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" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

John Updike

Difficult

Stories

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

" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" 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. "

" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "

John Updike

Early

Late

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

" 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. "

" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "

" My father taught only math. "

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

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

" I like short stories. "

John Updike

Short

Short Stories

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

John Updike

Prolific

Tend

" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

John Updike

Existence

Experience

" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "

John Updike

Think

Books

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

John Updike

New

You

" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "

" 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. "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" 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. "

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" 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. "

" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "

John Updike

Myself

Things