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
careless class editors ideal lap last malevolent meddling reviewers steer struggle words writers
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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.
generation hope last living maybe shop writer
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
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.
lasts details physicist
The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through.
book errors lasts
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
lasts literature moments
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
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.