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" 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
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" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "
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" 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. "
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Experience
" Gods don't answer letters. "
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" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
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" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "
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" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "
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" 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
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Broken
" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
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He
" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "
John Updike
First
Wanted
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" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "
John Updike
Eats
Face
Mask
" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "
John Updike
Bricks
Architecture
Consciousness
" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "
John Updike
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Good
Us
" 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
" 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
" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "
John Updike
Almost
Nothing
Worse
" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "
John Updike
Beach
Result
Sun
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "
John Updike
Lust
Meet
Roll
" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "
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More
Lovely
Serious
" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "
John Updike
Beautiful
Life
Language
" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "
John Updike
Know
Trying
Thought
" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "
John Updike
Feel
Look
Old
" 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
" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "
John Updike
Said
Writer
20th Century
" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "
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Belief
Voluntary
Must
" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
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Government
Alone
Leaves
" All love comes from the family. "
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Family
Love
" Writing makes you more human. "
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More
You
Human
" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "
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Freedom
Happiness
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" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "
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Support
Encouragement
Society