John Updike Quotes

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

I met Eva Ibbotson before I became a writer myself, and was in awe of her then.

Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.

I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

I like the hip writers: Fitzgerald, the guy who committed suicide, Hemingway, all those guys. Some of them were alcoholics and drug addicts but they had fun. They were real people. They formed the culture of American literature. Hemingway admired Tolstoy, Tolstoy admired Pushkin, and Mailer admired Hemingway. It all flows down. The greats are all connected. One day I'm gonna write a book myself. The first chapter will be about what a rough deal my momma got. She believed in you guys and your society.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

What I've realized in the last year, 80% of my act has already happened to me, and it's not until you retell the story at a party or to a friend or it comes up on the podcast that you, I don't know why I'm not doing that onstage!

I have a troubled relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, not just because he kicked me out of a bar but also because it's become clear to me that he was not a good person.