Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. — John Updike Copy Share Image
If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. — John Updike Copy Share Image
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. — John Updike Copy Share Image
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has… — John Updike Copy Share Image
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The… — John Updike Copy Share Image
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel… — John Updike Copy Share Image
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the… — 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
Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. — John Updike Copy Share Image
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. — John Updike Copy Share Image
My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. — 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
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. — John Updike Copy Share Image
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. — 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
