Literary Birthday – 18 March – John Updike

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

John 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 is known for his craftsmanship and realistic depiction of American, Protestant, small-town, middle-class life. Updike explored themes like fidelity, religion, and responsibility. He published more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short story collections. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism. Updike’s array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. After Updike’s death, Harvard’s Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.

Source for Image Credit: Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Updike,_author_at_PEN_Congress,_cropped.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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