About John Updike: John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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 to find ways to make them interesting.
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.
When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what h...
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some d...
American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.
In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
