John Updike Quotes

There's something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.

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.

If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

I'd like my writing to be recognized with a Grammy.

I didn't like being a name attached to a book.

My position as the best-selling author at E! is secure - unless Salman Rushdie develops a show with them.

Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

I didn't write a book. It wasn't for self-enrichment.

One man is as good as another until he has written a book.

You can't be admitted to the ranks of writers of importance unless you have sales.