Fiction Quotes by John Updike

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

— John Updike

Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.

— John Updike

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of…

— John Updike

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want…

— John Updike

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of…

— John Updike

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

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

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

— John Updike

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

— John Updike

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

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as…

— John Updike

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and…

— John Updike

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

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was…

— John Updike

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a…

— John Updike

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

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the…

— John Updike

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or…

— John Updike

“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.”

— John Updike

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

— John Updike