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
age certain sequels suppose
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
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.
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.
exciting poetry tend
I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.
encompass
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
tends
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
amount author colleges pinch poke tempting
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.