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
artistic brain concept enter explicit good honest life living reading short silence since social somebody taste willing words writer
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. 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.
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.
hard man played
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
children
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.
artist brings destroying exist
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else
exile extremes grandeur host human likes plays york
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
america experience lacks since thirteen
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.
diminishes perception possession
Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately
drops four muse poetry ran time
I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
behind hope revealed snail words
We hope the ""real"" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
might
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
novelist
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
activity becomes cares creative doer
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better.
exile york
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.