A Quote by John Updike

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

John Updike

Quote Topics

Duty Fiction Me Sense

Quote Author

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

When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

Bryan Stevenson

We're completely confused about the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. To me, the moment you compose, you're fictionalising; the moment you remember, you're dreaming. It's ludicrous that we have to pretend that non-fiction has to be real in some absolute sense.

David Shields

We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

The sense of obligation to continue is present in all of us. A duty to strive is the duty of us all. I felt a call to that duty.

Abraham Lincoln

The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

George Saunders

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.

John Updike

Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.

Joanna Scott

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

Debra Granik

Prayer is the language of a man burdened with a sense of need.

Edward McKendree Bounds

Everyone has to have a sense of duty. A duty to society, to their family. I mean, you name it.

Prince Philip

News is almost more interesting to me than other people's fiction, if that makes sense. But other people's fiction in terms of design is still incredibly interesting to me.

Neill Blomkamp

I don't think people who are already burdened with social, economic, psychological situations, dysfunctional families, need to be burdened with other people with the same problems.