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" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "
John Updike
Progress
Paper
Morning
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" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "
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Government
Madness
Either
" 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. "
John Updike
Appreciation
Paint
Heart
" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
John Updike
Lonely
Light
Sidewalk
" My father taught only math. "
John Updike
Father
Taught
Only
" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "
John Updike
Golf
Excess
Activity
" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "
John Updike
Say
Future
Much
" 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
Now
Enough
" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "
John Updike
Poor
City
You
" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "
John Updike
Far Away
Away
Live
" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "
John Updike
Shot
Make
Hard
" 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
" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "
John Updike
Even
Person
Same
" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "
John Updike
Set
Might
Just
" 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. "
John Updike
Quality
People
Men
" 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
" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
John Updike
Hearts
New
Pleasing
" There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. "
John Updike
You
Work
Try
" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "
John Updike
Credit
Writing
Whatever
" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
John Updike
People
Themselves
" 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
" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "
John Updike
Icon
Young
Useful
" 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
" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "
John Updike
Pitcher
Baseball
Encompass
" 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. "
John Updike
Myself
Write
Say
" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "
John Updike
Glory
Seek
World
" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "
John Updike
Visualize
Farm
House
" 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
" 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. "
John Updike
Star
Writer
Better
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "
John Updike
Paper
Book
Predict