Writer Quotes by John Updike

Authors should be honored only for their works.

— John Updike

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

— John Updike

Writing makes you more human.

— John Updike

Writers’ lives break into two halves,

— John Updike

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

— John Updike

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or…

— John Updike

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

— John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

— John Updike

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

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

— John Updike

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

— John Updike

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

— John Updike

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

— 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

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so…

— John Updike

“To become less and transmit more, to replenish energy with wisdom - some such hope, at this more than midpoint in my…

— John Updike

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition,…

— John Updike

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

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

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

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east…

— John Updike

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The…

— John Updike

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

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to…

— John Updike

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

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

— John Updike

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

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

— John Updike

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence…

— John Updike

“Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we…

— John Updike

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

— John Updike

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.

— John Updike

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

— John Updike

“Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.”

— John Updike

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

— John Updike

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

— John Updike

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

— John Updike

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

— John Updike

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

— John Updike

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

— John Updike