I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.

When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

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

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

All love comes from the family.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

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.

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.

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.