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
hate home thinking
Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.
mean artist light
A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
doe fool april
Looking foolish does the spirit good.
art book home
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
dwarves littles fame
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
self creative use
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
heart guidance guides
Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
moving heart history
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
bears finishing painting
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
heart fire burning
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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.
atheist believe men
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
ambiguity clash extremes
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
god lambs wells
God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb.