John Updike Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

  John Updike

  New York, Book, Writing

  John Updike (2013). “Picked-Up Pieces: Essays”, p.472, Random House

• I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

  John Updike

  Book, Writing, Novelists

  FaceBook post by John Updike from Dec 22, 2013

• Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

  John Updike

  Book, Writing, Wind

• Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

  John Updike

  Book, Kissing, Average

  John Updike (2008). “Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism”, p.68, Random House

• It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

  John Updike

  Book, Smell, Giving

• The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.

  John Updike

  Football, Mother, Morning

• I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.

  John Updike

  Book, Hands, Numbers

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, Univ Pr of Mississippi

• I think books should have secrets, like people do.

  John Updike

  Book, Thinking, Should Have

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.35, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.

  John Updike

  Book, Design, Trying

• If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.

  John Updike

  Book, Writing, Looks

• Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.

  John Updike

  New York, Book, Cutting

  John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.216, Random House

• What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.

  John Updike

  Believe, Book, What Matters

• I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.

  John Updike

  Art, Book, Home

  John Updike's tstimony given before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor in Boston, Massachusetts, January 30, 1978.

• The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

  John Updike

  Book, Errors, Lasts

  John Updike (2013). “More Matter: Essays And Criticism”, p.866, Penguin UK

• I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

  John Updike

  Book, Thinking, Interesting

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.210, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin