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
handing pencil poem wanting
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
cartoonist pictures wanting writer
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.
world want enough
We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything
love world want
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
want down-and young-writers
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.
people want compromise
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
book writing want
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
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.