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" It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. "
John Updike
Appreciation
Paint
Heart
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" 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
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" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "
John Updike
Inner
Good
Us
" 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 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.' "
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You
Nobody
Better
" 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
" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "
John Updike
See
Why
Reason
" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "
John Updike
Children
Eating
Men
" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "
John Updike
Visualize
Farm
House
" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "
John Updike
Eros
Everywhere
Binds
" Humor is my default mode. "
John Updike
Mode
Humor
Default
" I have never liked haircuts. "
John Updike
Liked
Haircuts
Never
" Sex is like money; only too much is enough. "
John Updike
Sex
Only
Like
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "
John Updike
Beautiful
Life
Language
" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "
John Updike
Hollywood
Theme
Age
" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "
John Updike
Twice
Think
Broken
" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "
John Updike
Ending
Good
Light
" 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. "
John Updike
Host
Loved
Year
" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "
John Updike
Shame
Secrets
Infancy
" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "
John Updike
Bees
Places
Inheritance
" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "
John Updike
After
Breath
Adultery
" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "
John Updike
Brains
Books
Turn
" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "
John Updike
Kid
Need
Science
" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "
John Updike
You
Internet
Learn
" 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
" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "
John Updike
Play
Relax
Moral
" We are most alive when we're in love. "
John Updike
Alive
Valentine's Day
Most
" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "
John Updike
First
Wanted
Then
" 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
" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "
John Updike
Room
Pulse
Noticed