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" 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. "
John Updike
Wait
Aging
Satisfaction
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" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "
John Updike
Success
Uncle
Death
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
John Updike
Honored
Only
Should
" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
John Updike
Take
Sane
Our
" 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. "
John Updike
Value
Believe
Writing
" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "
John Updike
Memory
Immersed
Instead
" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "
John Updike
Book
Average
Kiss
" All love comes from the family. "
John Updike
Family
Love
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "
John Updike
Going
Barefoot
Being
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" 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. "
John Updike
Art
Always
Universe
" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "
John Updike
Call
Beautiful
Almost
" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "
John Updike
Year
Patience
Healthy
" 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
Sympathy
Understanding
Light
" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
John Updike
Best
Time
Impression
" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "
John Updike
Male
Female
Write
" When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. "
John Updike
Lucky
Skin
Someone
" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "
John Updike
Hollywood
Theme
Age
" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "
John Updike
End
Golf
Pencil
" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "
John Updike
Beautiful
Life
Language
" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "
John Updike
Earth
Grace
Rain
" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "
John Updike
Must
House
Improvise
" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
John Updike
People
Themselves
" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "
John Updike
Resource
More
House
" 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. "
John Updike
Artist
Only
Skills
" Writing makes you more human. "
John Updike
More
You
Human
" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "
John Updike
After
Except
Survive
" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "
John Updike
Burdened
Duty
Sense
" 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. "
John Updike
Saying
Age
Long
" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "
John Updike
Writing
Sea
Criticism