Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried … - John Updike

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He would forget everybody's name, so everybody was called 'Pops'.

John Updike

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

Book, Fiction, Struck, Tried, Wind, Writing

Same Author Quotes

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

Art, Constant, Philosophy, Saying, Writing

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Beautiful, Imprint, Perfect, Taken, Truth, Useful

We are living in a world in which we don't give the young enough reason to live. The temper and the lyrics of a lot of punk music and so on is very, life sucks and then you die, sort of theory. I feel life is cheaper and death is more attractive now than it was when I was an adolescent, as I remember. Suicide was a personal pathology when it was committed. There was no society approval of it, like there certainly is in Palestine and some quarters of Iraq.

Adolescent, Giving, Life Sucks, Lyrics, Pathology, Suicide

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

Afraid Of Death, Altered, Each Day, Person, Time, Yesterday

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

Beloved, Doth, Fashion, Love, Mirrors, Produces