“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.” — 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
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. — 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
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
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
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
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
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
So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was… — 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
A man who reads a book for no particular profit becomes, while he reads, a gentleman, a man of leisure, a dandy… — 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
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
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. — 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
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
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
