Top 198 Quotes by John Updike

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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.

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.

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.

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

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

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.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.