'A kind of respect for middle-class, ordinary life, a belief that there was something worth saying about it' ... John Updike. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Guardian
John Banville
Expressions of dismay leap to the lips with awful smoothness on the death of an artist of the calibre of John Updike, but in this case the dismay is real. He was one of the great modern-day prose stylists in the English language, and if his style on occasion outstripped his content, so what? – the pleasure of reading Updike was always intense. Even at his most sophisticated he retained something in him of the Pennsylvania farm boy, and that Frostian and Emersonian directness was a foil to the more baroque urges of his language.
TC Boyle
He has been one of my heroes since I first learned how to read. And I admire his career. It's the kind of career that I think every writer would want to have. He is the foremost man of letters in this country by far. No one has even approached him. His ability to move from poetry, to short fiction, to his novels, to his essays, to his book reviews, it's a model for all of us.
EL Doctorow
He was an extraordinarily felicitious writer. He had great fluency and capacity for highly textured prose, and of course he was prolific. A really classic man of letters, in that he wrote novels and stories and criticism and reviews. He was a conscientious reviewer of contemporary work, he had a keen interest in art, which he wrote about regularly. That's what he was: a prodigious, classic man of letters; a chronicler of the American everyman.
Richard Ford
John Updike has been central to the landscape I've looked at since I was a teenager – and I'm nearly 65. But for all of his brilliance, his immense curiosity and great "width" as a writer who virtually thought straight on to the page at an extremely high level, in America we seemed almost to take him for granted. It's our way. He'd been around us all those years. As if there might be another writer like John come along in time. Well, there won't be.
David Lodge
John Updike was one of the great stars in the constellation of post-war American fiction, up there with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth. Unlike them he came from a Wasp background, and his special contribution was in showing how suburban white middle-class Americans were affected by the sexual revolution, notably in Couples; but he also created convincing characters from completely different social and ethnic backgrounds, for instance the genially satirical portrait of the Jewish novelist Bech. Above all, Updike was extravagantly gifted as a prose stylist, coining new metaphors and similes with apparently effortless ease, making us see, on page after page, the everyday world as if for the first time.
Ian McEwan
He was a modern master, a colossal figure in American letters, the finest writer working in English. He dazzled us with his interests and intellectual curiosity, and he turned a beautiful sentence. Religion, sex, science, urban decay, small-town life, the life of the heart, the betrayals – who can follow him? Updike gave the impression he had a lot more writing to do. We are all the poorer now.
Toni Morrison
It's a serious, serious loss, and a void in American literature.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's a terrible loss. He was a great writer. Truly a great writer, possessed of a luminous syle and a magnanimous spirit and wonderful sense of humour and generosity. And I'll miss him terribly. His influence has been so great, it's impossible just to speak of it in a very quick - a glib - way. He's had an enormous influence. He himself was so wonderfuly influenced in a very healthy way by Nabokov. Nabokov taught John Updike to look very carefully at sentences, at metaphor, and to look at language as an instrument of meaning in itself, quite apart from the content.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker
No writer was more important to the soul of the New Yorker than John. Even though his literary career transcended any magazine - he was obviously among the very best writers in the world - he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young. It's difficult to say how much we all thrived on that relationship. What a privilege to work at the same project. I never stopped thinking what he would think of what we were doing. We adored him. He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him.
Jane Smiley
One of my favourite books is Updike's collected stories about the writer Henry Bech. Bech is not Updike; he is more like, say, Saul Bellow, and he is put through a vast array of experiences that are quite humiliating. Bech is genially, but pointedly, satirised for being boorish, self-centred and insensitive, while Updike, as narrator, is wise and insightful. What I love about it is that it is wonderfully mean. Updike is such a limber stylist that you feel sympathy with Bech, but admiration for the narrator. It illustrates just how sly Updike was.
Zadie Smith
Updike's example seemed the model of a real writer's life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades. On top of that, he was a generous, intelligent reader who produced criticism that emphasised the intimate joys of reading, free of the usual dogma and cant. He had an almost sacred, illuminated sense of our little community of writers and readers and his death is a great loss.
Tom Wolfe
On a literary "skirmish" over Wolfe's 1998 novel, A Man in Full: He was a great competitor, and as writers go these days, a prolific writer. He's the only person I know of who made his first novel about old people. He was actually one of the few writers in the US who could support themselves just by writing. There may be 20 of them. Everybody else teaches college. We had a few running dumb fights as far back as the 1960s when I wrote a series about the New Yorker magazine, which he was very close to. But as I say, literary fights are actually great fun and he was a good battler.
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