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" I like short stories. "
John Updike
Short
Like
Short Stories
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" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "
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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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" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "
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" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "
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" 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. "
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" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "
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" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "
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" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "
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" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "
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" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "
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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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" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "
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" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "
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" 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. "
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" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "
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" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "
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" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "
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" Writing makes you more human. "
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" 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. "
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" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "
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" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
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" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "
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" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
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" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "
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" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "
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" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "
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" 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. "
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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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