John Updike Quotes

The man who doctors himself with the aid of medical books, runs the risk of dying of a typographical error.

Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.

He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book.

Never to read another book that was born and baptized (with ink) at the same time.

There are two books laid before us to study, to prevent our falling into error; first, the volume of the Scriptures, which reveal the will of God; then the volume of the Creatures, which express His power.

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

You want to publish with a publisher because a publisher knows how to publish a book. And you don't. You really don't.

From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 [books I've written].

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

It is true that writers often owe their most inspired thoughts, their most extraordinary phrases, to their generous typesetters, who assist their flights of fancy with so-called typographical errors.

[On being told party guests were ducking for apples:] There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.

To make a book is as much a trade as to make a clock; something more than intelligence is required to become an author.

No book is a chapter, no chapter tells the whole story, no mistake defines who we are. Hope makes our lives page turners.

It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book.