John Updike Quotes - Page 4

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys

The great thing about the dead, they make space.

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.

What we need is progress with an escape hatch.

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

Human was the music, natural was the static.

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

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.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.