"Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of..." - Quote by John Updike

“I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.”

“I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition.”

“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”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.”

“I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.”

“The only real people are the people who never existed.”

“I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.”

“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.”

“Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!”