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" 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
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" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "
John Updike
Artist
Only
Skills
" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "
John Updike
Government
Alone
Leaves
" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "
John Updike
Book
Still
Year
" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "
John Updike
Old Age
Old
Age
" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "
John Updike
American
Behind
Work
" I like short stories. "
John Updike
Short
Like
Short Stories
" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "
John Updike
Myself
Now
Enough
" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "
John Updike
Children
Wisdom
Parents
" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "
John Updike
God
America
Darkness
" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "
John Updike
Memory
Immersed
Instead
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" 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
" 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. "
John Updike
Star
Writer
Better
" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "
John Updike
Almost
Nothing
Worse
" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "
John Updike
Literature
Failure
Kind
" 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
Up
" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "
John Updike
Effort
Worth
Write
" 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. "
John Updike
Success
Uncle
Death
" 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
" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
John Updike
Lonely
Light
Sidewalk
" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
John Updike
Best
Time
Impression
" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "
John Updike
Eros
Everywhere
Binds
" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "
John Updike
Remaining
Part
True
" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "
John Updike
Place
Hobbies
Airplane
" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "
John Updike
Even
Person
Same
" 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. "
John Updike
Victory
Rocks
Win
" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "
John Updike
After
Breath
Adultery
" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "
John Updike
Bricks
Architecture
Consciousness
" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
John Updike
People
Themselves
" In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. "
John Updike
New York
New
Leaving