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
life years self
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
winning years white
Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year.
autumn grieving years
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
education learning years
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
years poetry four
I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
inspirational patience years
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
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.