John Updike Quotes

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

There is a plethora of topics to explore. I sometimes think I may never live long enough to explore all of the unique story lines I have either in my head or waiting in my computer file.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I tell my writing students that everything is material; just pay attention.

I get so much inspiration from my travels, but I also started an exercise where I write down so many words every week. Then I begin crossing them off. We create a grid of words and also images, but words for me are more ample because you can interpret them your own way.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.