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.

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

I have never liked haircuts.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

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

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

Nature refuses to rest.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

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.

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.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

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

Writing makes you more human.

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

I like short stories.

The rudest possible gift is a gift card. It means you think the person is stupid and has no interests. The only good gift card is Bitcoin. You practically have to be a hacker to know about it.

I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.