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" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "

John Updike

Quality

People

Men

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" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "

John Updike

Hope

Last

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

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

" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "

John Updike

Think

Books

" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

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

John Updike

Men

Women

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

" 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. "

John Updike

Plot

Having

" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

John Updike

Ink

Miracle

" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

John Updike

Prolific

Tend

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

John Updike

Existence

Experience

" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "

" 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. "

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

John Updike

Difficult

Stories

" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "

" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "