For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
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.'
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.
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 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.
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
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.
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.
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
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.
Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.