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
basketball boys playing pole telephone
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.
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.
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.
hard man played
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
cds play giving
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
exercise thinking play
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
criticism failure threatens
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
appeal primitive secretly television
I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.
arise artist create doubly intrinsic might novel reason talented
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
belong worried
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
family locate
Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.
deal escapist fact fantastic lives novel people time writer
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
The rich - they just live in another realm, really.
american-novelist rain sky
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.