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
great people raised
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
center fits hand hills last next ourselves pivotal poison rhythm shot ultimate within
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
mention takes thinks time
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
acts america beneath beyond darkness face freedom god madness paradise patient power rules wherever
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.
afraid child
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.
In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.
age certain sequels suppose
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
exciting poetry tend
I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
tends
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
amount author colleges pinch poke tempting
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
glad soviet universal
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.
almost animated family life movies needed pictures provide seemed
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.