The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — 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
Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up… — John Updike Copy Share Image
My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition,… — John Updike Copy Share Image
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my… — 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
“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he… — John Updike Copy Share Image
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we… — John Updike Copy Share Image
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life… — 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
I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go.… — 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
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation.… — 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
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
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
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
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
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
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts… — John Updike Copy Share Image
In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in… — 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
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
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
![“The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.” quote by John Updike](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/03e/john-updike-396_agreement_the-illusion-is-an-agreement-between-the_2135947.png)
