“On being conscious of being a writer: As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to… — John Updike Copy Share Image
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts… — 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
Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. — John Updike Copy Share Image
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. — John Updike Copy Share Image
I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. — 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
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many… — 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
I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board… — 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
“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he… — John Updike Copy Share Image
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want… — 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 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
The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between… — 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
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
If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life… — John Updike Copy Share Image
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. — 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
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
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
