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
lasts literature moments
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
life yummy long
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
teacher appreciation art
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
life-is-too-short reading writing
I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
artist risk excess
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
education learning years
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
motivational inspiring education
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
wickedness guts hard
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
neglected
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
book believe media
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
success writing decay
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
inspirational truth america
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
memories lenses old-memories
In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
zero writing thinking
I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.