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
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.
field impact instant second sine
In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none.
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
land littles towns
Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.
night together shade
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
music giving permission
Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
teacher husband school
I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.