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" 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

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" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

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" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

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" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

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" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

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

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "

John Updike

Myself

Things

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. "

" 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. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "