John Updike Quotes

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations... have imagined themselves to be more powerful or beautiful or brave or loving than they are.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I've been in situations before where something was going on, and that's the only way you can kinda cope with it is to write about it.

Often, I write to feel better and to heal - to cope with things that I'm dealing with. I'm either writing to get out of a feeling or to get into the feeling, to feel it more. Usually it's the perfect remedy, but if it isn't, I focus on other parts of what I'm making that don't involve writing. If neither are working, I simply forfeit the day.

Her writing was her only escape, her only means of survival. It was a respite from a cruel world, despite seemingly comfortable surroundings.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

The only thing that gets me through any type of pain, emotional or physical, is to make it worthwhile by putting it into my work.

Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.

Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

Sometimes it's not like I write very specific, it's more like I add an atmosphere almost to something that might have been quite awkward in my mind from the beginning. Something has happened and I want to force myself to think of it in a more positive way. And then I force myself to write something that convinces me that this is actually something pretty good or something that I learned something valuable from.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I'm writing-really fast. I'm puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It's an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It's sitting alone with fictional characters. You're escaping from the world in your own way and that's fine. Why not?

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.

I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.