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
thinking curiosity trying
Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
nice moving writing
Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.
cat secret computer
A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.
education children father
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
differences tragedy another-chance
Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
race car chance
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving...
zoos children mirrors
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
kings hero writing
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
patience tunnels doubt
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
golf swings trying
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
trying steps medusa
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
artist world doe
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
children dirty golf
Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
doors age analogies
Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.