"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and..." - Quote by John Updike

“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.”

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”

“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”

“I don't believe that you can possibly separate expression from thought in an imaginative work. The better a thing is expressed, the more completely it is thought.”

“The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.”

“Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.”

“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”

“Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We've been so busy damning ourselves for years. We've done it all, and yet we don't take credit for it.”

“Ronald Reagan is the world's largest Muppet.”