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.
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.
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.
green-world feels good-nature
In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
architecture sometimes good-and-bad
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
people good-times feels
Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
careless class editors ideal lap last malevolent meddling reviewers steer struggle words writers
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
empowered sit
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
men women
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
architecture mortar
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
afraid child
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.
In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.