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
brains homes
Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.
home sunshine simple
Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.
hate home thinking
Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.
art book home
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.
home car literature
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
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.