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
exercise thinking play
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
art exercise men
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
might
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
artistic kept playing rather tend wallace
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
exile extremes grandeur host human likes plays york
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
america experience lacks since thirteen
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.
diminishes perception possession
Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately
hard man played
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
children
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.
artist brings destroying exist
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else
family trying
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
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.'
bookstores harvard
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
almost arabic believer call prayer quite
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.