John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updikewas an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 March 1932
CountryUnited States of America
I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.
almost animated family life movies needed pictures provide seemed
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
life
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
caps features growing improved patch polar shallow shrinking telescopes visible
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
animator walt
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
electric excess measured pace permits
Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
diminishes perception possession
Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately
artistic brain concept enter explicit good honest life living reading short silence since social somebody taste willing words writer
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
human trying
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.
bestows color harsh march sentences sun
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.
bottle feed full hemingway literary trying york
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
brains homes
Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
tried
I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.
ink miracle print turning
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.