John Updike

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

“I don't think women are dumb.”

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

“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.”

“I think books should have secrets, like people do.”

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”

“It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.”

“As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.”

“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.”

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

“There's something very reassuring... about the written record.”

“Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.”

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

“My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.”

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

“What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

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

“Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.”

“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.”

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.”