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
expressed perhaps somehow subject written
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
aunt books boyhood came closely copy death fright jokes last opened pages success uncle visiting vivid waste written
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
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.
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.
onto
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
brains homes
Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.