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 - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.
John UpdikeMany men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John UpdikeFrom infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John UpdikePressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John UpdikeJournalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
John UpdikeIn fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John UpdikeThe breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John UpdikeThe - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John UpdikeI'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
John UpdikeIn general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John UpdikeThe throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John UpdikeThe stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John UpdikeMuseums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John UpdikeFenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.
John UpdikeBeing a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality.
John UpdikeYou always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.
John UpdikeIn a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.
John UpdikeAmong the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John UpdikeI have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.
John UpdikeChildren are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John UpdikeI will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John UpdikeThe muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John UpdikeCelebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen.
John UpdikeThe worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter.
John UpdikeSuddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John UpdikeProse should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John UpdikeThe heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.
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 UpdikeEach morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John UpdikeThere is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
John UpdikeTo say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
John UpdikeFiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John UpdikeWe all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John UpdikeI did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John UpdikeTo be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John UpdikeWe were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything
John UpdikePeople go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.
John UpdikeWe'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 to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike