John Updike New Quotations

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

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.