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" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

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

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" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

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

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" 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. "

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

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

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

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

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

" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "

" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "

" 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. "

" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" Sex is like money; only too much is enough. "

" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

" 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. "