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Writing Quotes by John Updike
- We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer…
- Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
- In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain…
- Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
- Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
- There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
- Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this…
- When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
- Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
- Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
- A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent…
- I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to…
- I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.
- Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
- The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
- I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what…
- Writing makes you more human.
- I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of…
- My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
- For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
- Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say,…
- How do you write women so well? I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov