John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updikewas an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 March 1932
CountryUnited States of America
both cardboard changing heavy moved twice weight
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
knows moved physical presence reader
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
artistic kept playing rather tend wallace
Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
artistic brain concept enter explicit good honest life living reading short silence since social somebody taste willing words writer
I think ''taste'' is a social concept and not an artistic one. 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 be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
money seemed sold
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
children
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.
family trying
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
artist brings destroying exist
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before and he does it without destroying something else
exile extremes grandeur host human likes plays york
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
america experience lacks since thirteen
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.
diminishes perception possession
Midas's Law: Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately
hard man played
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
bestows color harsh march sentences sun
Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.