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" 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. "

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" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "

" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" 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. "

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

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

" I like short stories. "

" I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. "

" 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. "

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" 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. "

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

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" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "

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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. "

" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "