John Updike Quotes

Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Writing songs helped me figure out how to communicate with other people. I finally figured out that if I could express something in a song, I could probably express it in my real life, too.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.

I see a skill developing of writing about not just feelings that I'm feeling, but things that I deeply care about as well.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

I mean, what do you think creativity is? Nothing but self-indulgence. And the more self-indulgent it is, the more interesting it becomes. So I think that part of creativity is also falling in love with your own narcissism: accepting it, using it as an asset.

Out of frustration, I say things. Now, people listen to me so much I can say it under my breath and everybody hears me... I said in the past that I'm a work in progress, and I feel like I'm progressing.

At the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, we learned to express ourselves, and I've been expressing myself ever since.

I feel like I'm a much better person when I'm developing my imagination and my innocence and my vulnerability. I like that version of me better than the version where I'm just working on my analytical mind.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I try to put all I am as a person into what I do. My intelligence, my emotion. I've done that in everything.

I love how people in this business push themselves to know themselves, the world, and their creativity better.

Self-awareness is not the same thing as self-approval, any more than imagination is the same thing as day-dreaming.

Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.

I'm not that guy who thinks I have all the answers. Writing is a means of communicating, and if enough people say, 'I don't get it,' it's worth looking at.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

I began working quite young, writing, growing, maturing, always striving to top myself - to make people laugh hard at things they know and believe deep in their hearts to be true.

I like to write when I feel I'm the real me.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

I'll never be August Wilson - but what I can be is more of myself.