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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' "

" I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

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

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

" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

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

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" 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. "

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "

" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "

" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "

" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "

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

" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" 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. "

" 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. "