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Other authors named John:
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Author's popularity: 1
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | He skates saucily over great tracts of confessed ignorance. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | It was one of history's great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | We hope the "real" person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. |
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Biography
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John Updike (born March 18 1932) is an American novelist and short story writer born in Reading, Pennsylvania and lived in nearby Shillington until he was 13. Updike's most famous works are his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, and Rabbit, Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 21 novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. His works often explore sex, faith, death, and their interrelationship.
As a child Updike suffered from psoriasis and stammering, and he was encouraged by his mother to write. Updike entered Harvard University on a full scholarship, graduating summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English before joining The New Yorker as regular contributor. In 1959 he published a well-regarded collection of short stories, The Same Door, which included both "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" and "A Trillion Feet of Gas." Other classic stories include "A&P," "Pigeon Feathers," "The Alligators," and "Museums and Women."
He favors realism and naturalism in his writing; for instance the opening of Rabbit, Run, spans several pages describing a pick-up basketball game in intricate detail. Most of his novels follow this style at least loosely, and generally feature everyday people in middle America — the hero of his writing is typically an everyman one can find on the streets. He on occasion abandons this setting, for instance in The Witches of Eastwick (1984, a novel about witches, later made into a movie of the same name), The Coup (1978, about a fictional Cold War era African dictatorship), and in his 2000 postmodern novel Gertrude and Claudius (a prelude to the story of Hamlet illuminating three versions of the legend including William Shakespeare's). Other important novels include The Centaur (National Book Award, 1963), Couples (1968) and Roger's Version (1986). In addition to Henry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a recurrent Updike alter-ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech who is chronicled in three comic short story cycles, Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). His stories involving the socially-conscious (and socially-climbing) couple "The Maples" are widely considered to be semi-autobiography|autobiographical]], and several were the basis for a television movie entitled Too Far to Go starring Michael Moriarity and Blythe Danner which was broadcast on NBC. Updike stated that he chose this surname for the characters because he admired the beauty and resilliency of the tree of that name.
While Updike has continued to publish at the rate of about a book a year, critical opinion on his work since the early nineties has been generally muted, often damning. His novelistic scope in recent years has nevertheless been wide: retellings of mythical stories (Tristan and Isolde in Brazil, 1994; the Hamlet prequel of Gertrude and Claudius, 2000), generational saga (In The Beauty of the Lilies, 1996) science fiction (Toward the End of Time, 1997). In Seek My Face (2002) he explored the post-war art scene; in his latest novel Villages (2004), Updike returns to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England.
A large anthology of short stories from his formative career, titled The Early Stories 1953–1975 (2003) won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He wrote that his intention with the form was to "give the mundane its beautiful due."
Updike is a well-known and practicing critic (Assorted Prose 1965, Picked-Up Pieces 1975, Hugging the Shore 1983, Odd Jobs 1991, More Matter 1999), and is often in the center of critical wars of words. Tom Wolfe called him one of "my three stooges" (the other two were John Irving and Norman Mailer). Updike has also been involved in critical duels with Gore Vidal, another author notorious for his criticisms.
He currently lives in Massachusetts. His next book will be a collection of essays on art, Still Looking (Knopf, 2005).
External link
*The Centaurian - Website dedicated to information about Updike
*Full Biography, Photo Gallery and Online Video
*Brief biography at Kirjasto
*1984 Audio Interview with John Updike - RealAudio (31 min 33 s)
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Updike".
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