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
emotional agreement stories
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
order devil body
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
self essentials literature
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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?
leadership men people
A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
quality way firsts
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
doors age analogies
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.
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.
basketball baseball country
There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
years poetry four
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
education learning years
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
neglected
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
writing humanity may
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
trying steps medusa
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.