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" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
John Updike
Doing
Right
Better
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" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "
John Updike
Pitcher
Baseball
Encompass
" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "
John Updike
Some
Belong
Sunday
" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "
John Updike
Brains
Books
Turn
" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "
John Updike
Family
Over
Thinking
" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "
John Updike
Boring
Art
Deep
" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "
John Updike
Far Away
Away
Live
" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "
John Updike
Limits
Me
Writing
" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "
John Updike
Age
Interesting
Hero
" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "
John Updike
About
Something
Very
" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "
John Updike
More
Lovely
Serious
" 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. "
John Updike
Room
Pulse
Noticed
" 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
Host
Loved
Year
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
John Updike
People
Themselves
" The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. "
John Updike
Losing
Spiritual
Success
" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "
John Updike
Memory
Immersed
Instead
" 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
" 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. "
John Updike
Children
Wisdom
Parents
" 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. "
John Updike
Door
Walls
Right
" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "
John Updike
Books
Us
Sense
" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "
John Updike
You
Internet
Learn
" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "
John Updike
Like
Existence
Experience
" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "
John Updike
Freedom
Happiness
Individual
" 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
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "
John Updike
Labels
Write
Would
" When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. "
John Updike
Tree
Age
Early
" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "
John Updike
Me
Everything
Because
" 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
" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "
John Updike
Twice
Think
Broken