"The creative writer uses his life as..." - Quote by John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
More by John Updike
“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.”
“The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”
“Women are an alien race set down among us.”
More on Writing
“I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.”
“I wrote the book [Today Matters] because I have a passion to help people personally grow. Really what it is, it's a personal growth book.”
“Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.”
More on Creativity
“Tell the truth and make it rhyme”
“It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.”
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”