Quotes from John Updike
My father taught only math.
- John Updike
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
- John Updike
Belief, like love, must be voluntary.
- John Updike
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
- John Updike
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
- John Updike
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
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike
I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike
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.
- John Updike