There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

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.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

I'm a dull person.

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.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

All love comes from the family.

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

My father taught only math.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

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

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

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

People are incorrigibly themselves.