John Updike Country Quotations

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.