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" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "
John Updike
Kid
Need
Science
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" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "
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" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
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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. "
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" I have never liked haircuts. "
John Updike
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" 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. "
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Door
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" Nature refuses to rest. "
John Updike
Rest
Nature
Refuses
" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "
John Updike
Said
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20th Century
" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "
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" I like short stories. "
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Short
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" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "
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See
Why
Reason
" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "
John Updike
Hope
Last
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" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "
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Set
Might
Just
" 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
" 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
" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
John Updike
Looking
World
Publishers
" 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
Me
Things
" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "
John Updike
Arnold
Roth
Geniuses
" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "
John Updike
Almost
Nothing
Worse
" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "
John Updike
Dark
Thought
Sea
" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "
John Updike
After
Breath
Adultery
" 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
" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "
John Updike
Think
Books
Like
" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "
John Updike
Idiot
Golf
Child
" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "
John Updike
Brainy
Delivered
Inspiration
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "
John Updike
Blind
Advocate
Ungrateful
" 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
" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "
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Now
See
Why
" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "
John Updike
Two
Through
Poet