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
aesthetic empathetic lies paint viewer
It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.
clue narrative perhaps reader william
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
bottle feed full hemingway literary trying york
Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other
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.
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.
electric excess measured pace permits
Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
great ignorance skates tracts
He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance.
acute anxiety beyond hide nervous record sensation social touch
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
fully poem
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
aware blind celebrity deaf eats either extra fame goes input listened mask performer soon watched
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ''somebody,'' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.
cannot graduation help learn millions piece
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
onto
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
brains homes
Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
basketball boys playing pole telephone
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.