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" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "
John Updike
Think
Books
Like
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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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" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
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Best
Time
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" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "
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Effort
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Write
" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "
John Updike
Eats
Face
Mask
" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "
John Updike
Golf
Excess
Activity
" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "
John Updike
Men
Me
Women
" All love comes from the family. "
John Updike
Family
Love
" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "
John Updike
Daily
Financial
Good
" 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. "
John Updike
Plot
Having
Me
" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
John Updike
Lonely
Light
Sidewalk
" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "
John Updike
Together
Silent
Pressure
" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "
John Updike
Creative
Creativity
Doer
" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "
John Updike
Set
Might
Just
" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "
John Updike
Hard
Dislike
Man
" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "
John Updike
Poor
City
You
" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
John Updike
Sense
Life
Trash
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" 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
" 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
End
Golf
Pencil
" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "
John Updike
Know
Trying
Thought
" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "
John Updike
Quality
People
Men
" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "
John Updike
Going
Barefoot
Being
" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "
John Updike
Eros
Everywhere
Binds
" By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. "
John Updike
Time
Partnership
Dissolved
" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "
John Updike
Myself
Write
Say
" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "
John Updike
Male
Female
Write
" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "
John Updike
Eyes
Enjoy
Ball
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
John Updike
Sympathy
Understanding
Light