"I really don't want to encourage young..." - Quote by John Updike

“Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.”

“Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.”

“We are most alive when we're in love.”

“No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.”

“Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but rather spirits- of-wine: they can catch fire, and then they give off heat.”

“Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.”

“All characters come from people I know, but after the initial inspiration, I tend to modify the characters so they fit with the story.”

“It is only men who are free, who create the inventions and intellectual works which to us moderns make life worth while.”

“Real work is completed in silence and strikes a chord in the minds of only a very few.”