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
life
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
faith gloomy life witness
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
money seemed sold
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
artist brings destroying exist
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else
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.
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.
family trying
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
artistic kept playing rather tend wallace
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
bad
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
fully poem
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
animation cartoonist credit whatever
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.