Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

— John Updike

Growth is betrayal.

— John Updike

Gutenberg (hesitantly): Perhaps the book, like God, is an idea some men will cling to. The revolution of print pursued a natural course. Like a river, print flowed to its readers, and the cheapness of the means permitted it, where the channel was narrow, to trickle. This electronic flood you describe has no banks; it massively delivers but what to whom? There is something intrinsically small about its content, compared to the genius of its working. And--if I may point out a technical problem--its product never achieves autonomy from its means of delivery. A book can lie unread for a century, and all it needs to come to life is to be scanned by a literate brain.

— John Updike

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

— John Updike

He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate incoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.

— John Updike

He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons.

— John Updike

Humor is my default mode.

— John Updike

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.

— John Updike

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

— John Updike

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.

— John Updike