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
general habitable maintained private public spaces virtually york
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
death space great-things
The great thing about the dead, they make space.
mean eye space
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
lying space blue
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
space religion stories
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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.
america reagan
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.