John Updike
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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.
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
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.'
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.
There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.
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 he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.
Writing makes you more human.
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
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.
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering.
My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.