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
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.
I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror.
socially
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
exile york
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
animation cartoonist credit whatever
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
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.
acute anxiety beyond hide nervous record sensation social touch
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
drops four muse poetry ran time
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
coin fairly financial good love modest reward sort task vocation
It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.
eloquently
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
novelist
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
aware
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
belong worried
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
human trying
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.