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" 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. "

John Updike

People

Change

Facts

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" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

John Updike

Ink

Miracle

" 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. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" 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. "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

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

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "

" It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

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

" My father taught only math. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

John Updike

Religion

Ignore

" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

John Updike

You

Human

" All love comes from the family. "

John Updike

Family

Love

" 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. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

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

" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "

" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "