“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
More from John Updike on Writing
“The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.”
“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”
“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and...”
Flaubert
9 quotes“Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of gen...”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.”
Robert Frost
6 quotes“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“Literature is language charged with meaning”