Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — 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
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. — 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
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. — 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
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
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
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 - 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. — John Updike Copy Share Image
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east… — John Updike Copy Share Image
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 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
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
How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. — 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
Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. — John Updike Copy Share Image
“The fiction writer is the ombudsman who argues our humble, dubious case in the halls of eternal record.” — 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
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
