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" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

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" We are most alive when we're in love. "

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" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "

" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "

" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

" I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "

" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "