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
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.
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.
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.
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.