John Updike Quotes

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

I like small stories.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I love writing shorter fiction.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.