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" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "
John Updike
Must
House
Improvise
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" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "
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" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "
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" Nature refuses to rest. "
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" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
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" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "
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" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "
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" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "
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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. "
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" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "
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" 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. "
John Updike
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" 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
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" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "
John Updike
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" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "
John Updike
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" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "
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" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "
John Updike
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" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. "
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Day
Number
" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "
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" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
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" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "
John Updike
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" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
John Updike
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" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "
John Updike
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" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
John Updike
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" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "
John Updike
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" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "
John Updike
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" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "
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" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
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" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "
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" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
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" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "
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" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "
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