"Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable..." - Quote by John Updike

“Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.”

“Fraud makes the world go round.”

“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.”

“I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book.”

“I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

“I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.”

“Authors should be honored only for their works.”

“If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people readingfor the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.”

“Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.”