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" I don't think women are dumb. "
John Updike
Women
Dumb
Think
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" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
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" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "
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" 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. "
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" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "
John Updike
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" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "
John Updike
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" 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. "
John Updike
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" 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. "
John Updike
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" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
John Updike
Doing
Right
Better
" 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. "
John Updike
Art
Spiritual
Respect
" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
John Updike
Government
Alone
Leaves
" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
John Updike
Take
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Our
" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
John Updike
Hearts
New
Pleasing
" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "
John Updike
Sometimes
Speak
Speech
" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "
John Updike
More
Difficult
Stories
" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
John Updike
Looking
World
Publishers
" I like short stories. "
John Updike
Short
Like
Short Stories
" 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. "
John Updike
Losing
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" 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. "
John Updike
Human
Dreams
Your Dreams
" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "
John Updike
Freedom
Happiness
Individual
" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "
John Updike
Nothing
Heaven
End
" 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. "
John Updike
More
Lovely
Serious
" Humor is my default mode. "
John Updike
Mode
Humor
Default
" 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
" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "
John Updike
Some
Belong
Sunday
" 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
" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "
John Updike
Religion
Ignore
Us
" 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
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" 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
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Language
" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "
John Updike
Effort
Worth
Write
" 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. "
John Updike
You
Work
Try