Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. — John Updike Copy Share Image
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.” — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. — John Updike Copy Share
I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl… — John Updike Copy Share
The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our… — John Updike Copy Share
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. — John Updike Copy Share
“The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug… — John Updike Copy Share
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications… — John Updike Copy Share
“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he… — John Updike Copy Share
I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. — John Updike Copy Share
“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the… — John Updike Copy Share
