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" 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

Lovely

Serious

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" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

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

" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

John Updike

Prolific

Tend

" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

John Updike

Difficult

Stories

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

John Updike

Enough

Harvard

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

John Updike

New

You

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" 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. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" We are most alive when we're in love. "

" 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. "

" 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. "