John Updike

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

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

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

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.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

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

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

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

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

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.