How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability. — 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
There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. — 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
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
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 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 - 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
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
“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
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
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
