John Updike Quotes

It's the obvious thing to say but artists want to be able to tell all kinds of stories and tear down every kind of wall, to look at ourselves and examine who we are and just get deeper insights into what makes us human beings. Anything that could possibly prevent that in our near future horrifies me to no end.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I feel like, whatever movie I was making, there would always be moments of human intimacy and insight into a little bit of what makes us tick as people.

The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover.

Self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it.

I'm interested in the psychological exploration of human nature, and it just happens to come in the form of film-making.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I think a lot of Magnum was me.

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

Making movies is a way of understanding myself and the world.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.

I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.

There is good and evil within all of us, and I enjoy searching to bring that out through my music. I like it that there are questions brought out by my music. People must look inside themselves for the answers

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night... Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.

Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

I can't single out one of my books or characters as a favorite. In the same way that I don't have a favorite kidney, my books are organically all part of myself. I might even say that put all together, the books are one ongoing, developing story - which, not coincidentally, happens to be my own lifestory.

I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone who lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about oneself. --From the Introduction

If he thought at all, but I don't believe he ever thought, it was that he and his shadow, when brought near each other, would join like drops of water.

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.