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
age basically heroes lives mundane ways writer
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.
discovered distracted narrow novels people tastes
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.
age fascinate seem
The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
tend writers
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
cumulative dwelling occupied possession
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
authentic authors ranks roll
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
men women
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
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.
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.
aunt books boyhood came closely copy death fright jokes last opened pages success uncle visiting vivid waste written
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
according art gratuitous
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
mix philip pulse
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.
historical kid liked science though
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.