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" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

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

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" 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. "

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

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

" 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. "

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

" 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. "

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" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

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

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" 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 refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

" 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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" 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. "