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" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

John Updike

Plot

Having

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" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

John Updike

People

Themselves

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

" 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. "

" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "

" By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "

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

" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

John Updike

Excess

Some

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "

" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

John Updike

Enough

Harvard

" 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. "

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

" 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

Writing

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "