Updike Redux

I basically read for escape from my own world into other worlds. And I was attracted to people who wrote funny books, books that made me laugh. James Thurber was a childhood idol. Robert Benchley, various New York and New Yorker writers. (...) But Shakespeare, of course, was an especially great revelation. And out of college I discovered Proust for myself. (...) J.D. Salinger was a new writer when I got out, by the time I was out of college. And I read him with great interest because he seemed to me to be really opening new territory or to be seeing America in a new way. And of course Nabokov was also a revelation in what… What a writer, I guess, what a young writer is looking for are new ways to write, or a fresh way to write, and Salinger, Nabokov, Proust, and Henry Greene are the ones who woke me up most vividly.
Retirado da entrevista de Lila Azam Zanganeh, 2006, publicada em Novembro de 2010.

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