John Updike

John Updike sat down with Charles Thomas Samuels of The Paris Review in 1968, discussing his early years as a writer, his well known novels, his philosophies about writing, and why he doesn’t like giving interviews.

“I have tried to achieve objectivity in the form of narrative,” he said. “My work is meditation, not pontification, so that interviews like this one feel like a forcing of the growth, a posing. I think of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas but as objects, with different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists. My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

Additional Interviews With John Updike
Updike talked about the inspiration for the novels “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Rabbit Run,” and “The Coup” in a 1984 interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio.

Updike discussed “wives, literature … and mortality” in a 1987 interview with British novelist Martin Amis for The Observer.

Updike spoke to Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1987, 1997 and 1998.

Updike appeared on PBS’ “Charlie Rose” 10 times between 1995 and 2008.

To learn more about John Updike, visit his profile on findingDulcinea.