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 future
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
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.
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.
writing merit artistic
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
field impact instant second sine
In his field - where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non - Kidd is second to none.
agents literary seemed york
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.
almost asked photograph sell supposed work written
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
coin fairly financial good love modest reward sort task vocation
It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.
good hard tee
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
novelist
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
trying
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.
aware
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
human trying
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.