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" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "
John Updike
Where
Rules
Extremes
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" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "
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" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "
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" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "
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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. "
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" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "
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" 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
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" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "
John Updike
Year
Patience
Healthy
" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "
John Updike
Golf
Excess
Activity
" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "
John Updike
Wait
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Satisfaction
" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
John Updike
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Been
Costs
" 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
" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "
John Updike
Icon
Young
Useful
" 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. "
John Updike
New
Body
Love
" 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
" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "
John Updike
Without
Come
Dreams
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
John Updike
Honored
Only
Should
" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "
John Updike
Knows
Self
Own
" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "
John Updike
Art
Always
Universe
" 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
" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "
John Updike
Ink
Me
Miracle
" I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. "
John Updike
Value
Believe
Writing
" Humor is my default mode. "
John Updike
Mode
Humor
Default
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "
John Updike
Eats
Face
Mask
" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "
John Updike
Young
Writer
World
" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "
John Updike
Live
Really
Just
" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "
John Updike
Look
Houses
Chimney
" Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. "
John Updike
Past
Who
Playing
" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "
John Updike
Far Away
Away
Live
" 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.' "
John Updike
You
Nobody
Better