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
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.
socially
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
animation cartoonist credit whatever
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
sane sociable
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
yesterday each-day afraid-of-death
Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?
wickedness guts hard
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
neglected
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
kings hero writing
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
nice moving writing
Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
dwarves littles fame
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
rotting too-much dandelions
So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls.
time partnership dissolving
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.