Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. — 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
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
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
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. — John Updike Copy Share Image
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. — 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
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
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
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
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
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in… — 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
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
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
Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors… — 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
“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 want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — 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
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
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
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
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. — 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
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
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
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
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather… — 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
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal… — 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
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes.… — John Updike Copy Share Image
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway. — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
