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" 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. "

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" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

" 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. "

" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "

" 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. "

" When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" 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. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "