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
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.
handing pencil poem wanting
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
sends
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
criticism failure threatens
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
brick chelsea city fog grandeur nightmare pavement row sweating
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
man reason women
How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
appears history occasions past seeks time visionary
Doctorow here appears not so much a re-constructor of history as a visionary who seeks in time past occasions for poetry.
money seemed sold
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
additional inward pair pressure sheer silent structure unstable wired
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
artistic future
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
great ignorance skates tracts
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
backward ceremony ending foot giant good mind throws touch weak
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.