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Meaning
This reads as a comment on a changing profession, where writing once could still be treated as a workable livelihood. It can be taken to mean that the business of being a writer has become harder to sustain, not just harder to start. It lands for anyone watching a craft turn less stable, especially when talent no longer feels enough to support a life.
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Originally said in English.
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About John Updike
American novelist, poet, and critic
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. He is known for a career that ranged across fiction, poetry, criticism, and children’s books, and for being one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Over the course of his career, Updike published more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, along with poetry and books of art and literary criticism. His work reflects that wide range, moving between fiction and commentary with equal ease.
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- “I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own b…”John Updike
- “Writing makes you more human.”John Updike
- “One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”John Updike
- “Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want…”John Updike
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- “People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”Flannery O'Connor
Explore Writing
- “Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.”Irvine Welsh
- “Negative experiences repeat as long as they remain useful to you.”Tawny Lara
- “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, ou…”Tim O'Brien
READ THE SOURCE
Books by John Updike
Rabbit, Run
2018
The Witches of Eastwick
2008
Couples
2001
The Centaur
1963
Marry Me
1996