The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John UpdikeFiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John UpdikeNothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
John UpdikeYou imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike