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" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "
John Updike
Belief
Voluntary
Must
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" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "
John Updike
Government
Madness
Either
" I like short stories. "
John Updike
Short
Like
Short Stories
" 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
" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "
John Updike
Said
Writer
20th Century
" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "
John Updike
Children
Eating
Men
" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
John Updike
Sense
Life
Trash
" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "
John Updike
Man
Bring
Poem
" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "
John Updike
Does
Much
Speak
" 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. "
John Updike
Transition
Pictures
Words
" I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. "
John Updike
America
Choice
Live
" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "
John Updike
Know
Trying
Thought
" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
John Updike
Whatever
Been
Costs
" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "
John Updike
Victory
Rocks
Win
" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "
John Updike
Feel
Look
Old
" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "
John Updike
Art
Anything
Goes
" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "
John Updike
Idiot
Golf
Child
" 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
" My father taught only math. "
John Updike
Father
Taught
Only
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
John Updike
Hearts
New
Pleasing
" I don't think women are dumb. "
John Updike
Women
Dumb
Think
" 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
" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "
John Updike
Credit
Writing
Whatever
" Gods don't answer letters. "
John Updike
Answer
Gods
Letters
" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "
John Updike
American
Behind
Work
" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "
John Updike
Creative
Creativity
Doer
" 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
" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "
John Updike
Met
Author
First
" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "
John Updike
Eats
Face
Mask
" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "
John Updike
Ending
Good
Light