Literary Birthday – 18 March – John Updike

John Updike was born 18 March 1932 and died 27 January 2009.

10 Updike Quotes

1. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
2. What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
3. The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
4. Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
5. Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
6. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
7. Each 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.
8. Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
9. Museums 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.
10. I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.

John Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. His most famous work is his Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom series. Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote The Witches of Eastwick. He published more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short story collections.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

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