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
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
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. — 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
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
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — 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
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
“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
Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate,… — 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
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we… — 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'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for… — John Updike Copy Share Image
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“I think “taste” is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in… — 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
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when… — 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
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf,… — 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
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
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. — John Updike Copy Share Image
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east… — John Updike Copy Share Image
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 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
