Quotes About Updike

Sad to think that we won't have any new stories from John Updike, one of the last century's masters. But so many here in the two volumes of his collected stories, 186 by my count, stories to read, reread, savor over the course of a cold season. Updike's genius in the short form spills out of these many, many pages.

Updike quashed the voice of his conscience, while at the same time clinging to a "me-first Salvationism.

When I wrote my first serious novel, 'Interior', I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike's, 'The Coup', which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana.

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

I grew up reading Updike. I remember being alarmed to find that he had published short stories by the time he was 22. I think 'Pigeon Feathers' was the first collection of stories I read. Only much later did I discover his non-fiction reviewing and art criticism.

John Updike's first published book was a collection of poems.

English country life is more like Chekhov than The Archers or Thomas Hardy or even the Updike ethic with which it is sometimes compared.

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden.

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

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

It's a strange failure of the literary world that Updike never quite received his due. Despite winning two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards and countless other awards and honours, he was denied the Nobel.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore.

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

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family.

His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don't understand.

full of the belief that a conspiracy of women upholds the world.

I don't recall inclement weather on a fair day.

He] languidly went through the motions, like a disbelieving angel, misplaced in all this adult foolishness.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O'Conner and Grace Paley were bolder, more inventive stylists than Bellow, Updike, or any other American man except perhaps Baldwin,