John Updike Quotes

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

As a matter of fact, I deliberately look for the mundane, because I feel these stories are ignored. The most influential things that happen to virtually all of us are the things that happen on a daily basis. Not the traumas.

Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.

I like books steeped in the quotidian - details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading 'Mildred Pierce.' And I like fiction about money.

Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it's not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.

I want to show that drama doesn't lie only in blood and destroyed buildings but in daily life, in ordinary human beings.

So many things go on in life that never find their way into the movies because so much of it is unappealing. But that's what I want to show.

We live very ordinary lives.

Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that.

Life is not all high emotion. Some of the most interesting things are when its not highly emotional: little details of relationships and body language.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

The worst thing about television is that everybody you see on television is doing something better than what you're doing. You never see anybody on TV just sliding off the front of the sofa, with potato chip crumbs all over their shirt.

It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life.

...the routine of life goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust of habit.

I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.

You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.

There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.

Imagine every day to he 5 the last6 of a life surrounded with hopes, cares, anger, and fear. The hours, that come unexpectedly, will be so much the more grateful.