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" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "
John Updike
Burdened
Duty
Sense
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" I have never liked haircuts. "
John Updike
Liked
Haircuts
Never
" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "
John Updike
Old Age
Old
Age
" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "
John Updike
Art
Anything
Goes
" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "
John Updike
Living
Happy
Experience
" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "
John Updike
Golf
Excess
Activity
" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "
John Updike
Must
House
Improvise
" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "
John Updike
Play
Relax
Moral
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
John Updike
Honored
Only
Should
" 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
" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "
John Updike
Reading
Want
Child
" 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
" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
John Updike
Lonely
Light
Sidewalk
" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "
John Updike
Bees
Places
Inheritance
" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "
John Updike
Male
Female
Write
" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "
John Updike
Call
Beautiful
Almost
" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "
John Updike
Shame
Secrets
Infancy
" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "
John Updike
Learner
Teacher
Peasant
" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "
John Updike
Remaining
Part
True
" 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. "
John Updike
New
Body
Love
" When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. "
John Updike
Lucky
Skin
Someone
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "
John Updike
Space
New
Disaster
" 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
Me
Miracle
" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
John Updike
Take
Sane
Our
" 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
" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "
John Updike
Inner
Good
Us
" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "
John Updike
Hard
Dislike
Man
" 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. "
John Updike
Age
Interesting
Hero
" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "
John Updike
Set
Might
Just
" 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