A 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.

John Updike

Quote Topics

Accidents Actuality Being Control Creative His Life Mercy Presentation Self Thousand Uses Victim Well Work Writer

Quote Author

John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

Walter Kirn

He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.

William Shakespeare

Being a victim doesn't take much. There are built-in excuses for failure. Built-in excuses for being miserable. Built-in excuses for being angry all the time. No reason to trying to be happy; it's not possible. You're a victim. Victim of what? Well, you're a victim of derision. Well, you're a victim of America. You're a victim of America's past, or you're a victim of religion. You're a victim of bigotry, of homophobia, whatever. You're a victim of something. The Democrats got one for you. If you want to be a victim, call 'em up.

Rush Limbaugh

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Willa Cather

A writer turns his life into material, and if you’re in his life, he uses yours, too.

Walter Kirn

Fearlessness means faith in God: faith in his protection, His justice, His wisdom, His mercy, His love, and His Omnipresence... To be fit for Self-realization man must be fearless.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Life is full of physical infirmities that some might see as discriminations - total paralysis or serious mental impairment being two that are relevant to marriage. If we believe in God and believe in His mercy and His justice, it won't do to say that these are discriminations because God wouldn't discriminate. We are in no condition to judge what discrimination is. We rest on our faith in God and our utmost assurance of His mercy and His love for all of His children.

Dallin H. Oaks

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

Ted Solotaroff

A life that stood out as a gospel of self-forgetting service. He could have added fortune to fame but caring for neither he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world. The centre of his world was the south where he was born in slavery some 79 years ago and where he did his work as a creative scientist.

George Washington Carver

And sure enough,the youth in question was not his usual dapper self. His face was puffy, his eyes red and wild; his shirt(distressingly unbuttoned)hung over his trousers in sloppy fashion. All very out of charactar: Mandrake was normally defined by his rigid self-control. Somthing seemed to have stripped all that away. Well, the poor lad was emotionally brittle.He needed sympathetic handling. "You're a mess," I sneered "You've lost it big time. What's happened? All the guilt and self-loathing suddenly get to you? It can't just be that someone else called me, surly?

Jonathan Stroud

Fortunate is the person who has developed the self-control to steer a straight course towards his objectives in life, without being swayed from his purpose by either commendation or condemnation.

Napoleon Hill

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

Jodi Picoult

The young man who addresses himself in stern earnest to organizing his life-his habits, his associations, his reading, his study, his work-stands far more chance of rising to a position affording him opportunity to exercise his organizing abilities than the fellow who dawdles along without chart or compass, without plan or purpose, without self-improvement and self-discipline.

B. C. Forbes

Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias....Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.

William Strunk, Jr.

Only the development of his inner powers can offset the dangers inherent in man's losing control of the tremendous natural forces at his disposal and becoming the victim of his own achievements.