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" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "
John Updike
Say
Future
Much
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" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "
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" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "
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" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "
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" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "
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" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
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" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "
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" I'm a dull person. "
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" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "
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" 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
" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "
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" 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. "
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" 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
" Humor is my default mode. "
John Updike
Mode
Humor
Default
" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "
John Updike
Icon
Young
Useful
" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "
John Updike
Bring
Sometimes
Death
" Gods don't answer letters. "
John Updike
Answer
Gods
Letters
" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
John Updike
Return
Exile
He
" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "
John Updike
First
Wanted
Then
" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "
John Updike
Nothing
Heaven
End
" 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
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Light
" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "
John Updike
Drop
Different
Overhead
" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
John Updike
Sense
Life
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" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "
John Updike
Two
Through
Poet
" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "
John Updike
Belief
Voluntary
Must
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
John Updike
Government
Alone
Leaves
" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "
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" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "
John Updike
Lust
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" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "
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" 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. "
John Updike
Myself
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