John Updike Quotes

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

It seems to be typical of life in America ... that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

Struggling to stay in the middle class, and I love that. That's me and my dad and my family.

If you make a film about childhood, you've got to pick a moment - you know, 'The 400 Blows.'

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

It's true that I have a strong social sensibility, because - bah, because I raised thre children on my own, and I know the difficulties that can represent. All of that makes it appear that there's a difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen's program and mine. But the big ideas are the same.

Writing about your family is the hardest thing, unless you had the perfect happy family life, which very few of us have had.

Growing up, I was always involved in the deaf community.

My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.

I grew up in Omaha and Milwaukee, and was always a very inquisitive kid.

I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened.

Every family argues and goes through things.

The whole thing with the Rick James story sketch and the Prince story sketch - I recounted my past, you know? - and that's what I was doing. It's not like I sat down and said I want to come up with a great story about Rick James. That stuff really happened.

If 'Queen Of Denmark' was about my childhood, then 'Pale Green Ghosts' is definitely about my adolescence, and that period was completely dominated by electronic music.

I sacrificed a lot of things growing up.

My mom got 11 kids. We struggled.

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.

I have so much appreciation for how those two cultures have created who I am. I'm a full-blooded Brazilian, with an entire extended family of Brazilians, but I was born and raised in the U.S.

The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.

I very much want to write about some elements of my own growing up.

I lived in America. I love America.

I've been very lucky to have a family who has welcomed me and not been hung up on anything racial, almost overlooking the fact that there was a racial difference. But I can honestly say I do feel like I missed out on some lessons of what the African-American experience is like growing up.

Both of us have forged our careers in London, but a lot of my comedy influences come from my family and my childhood.

It was the first rent in the holy image of my father, it was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.