John Updike Quotes

My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.

It wasn't like I picked a camera up in 1989 and stopped making music. I picked a camera up and found another form of expression.

I really just want to continue to challenge myself. And I want to continue to grow as an artist. I never want to stop.

I always wanted to be an artist, whatever that was, like other chicks want to be stewardesses. I read. I painted. I thought.

You hope to be a part of something that makes you a better artist when you leave.

As soon as I went to painting school in New York, I took an experimental film course, and everything clicked and came together. I realized my love of music and drama and the visual arts all came together. This happened in 1989. Since then, it's been a long road of educating myself in every possible way.

I want to make a better record than I made the last time. I want to grow. I want to discover new things about myself creatively.

If you're any kind of artist, you've got to ... keep opening yourself to new possibilities.

I'm not singing anymore; that is why I am so pleased to be writing. My daughter said, "You just found a different way of using your voice."

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

Obviously I've always loved singing and performing, but I fell in love with songwriting and then I enjoyed doing that for other people and getting coached. But then I kind of stumbled into the right group of people that really started to create some unique music for me and what I wanted to say, so then it made me want to be an artist.

I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

I think the most important thing for me is a challenge. I'm not happy, creatively, unless I'm faced with a challenge. So, overcoming those challenges and really discovering characters that aren't like me helps me grow, as a person and as an artist.

Writing is only a guided dream.

Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

In a lot of senses, things are definitely changing in my life, and with what's going on around me. But I still feel like the writing process is as intimate as it as before, if not more. Because I need my time more than I had before.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

The guitar is your first wings. It's assigned and designed to unfold your vision and imagination.

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.