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
belong worried
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
tried
I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.
death pets seems
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
man reason women
How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
ink miracle print turning
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
sends
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
backward ceremony ending foot giant good mind throws touch weak
The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
brick chelsea city fog grandeur nightmare pavement row sweating
The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
socially
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
bit lived visualize worn
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
life firsts grownups
Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
feelings facts ease
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
book smell giving
It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.