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" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

John Updike

God

War

Sky

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" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" 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. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "

John Updike

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" 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. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

John Updike

Resource

House

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

" 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

Things

" 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. "

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

" 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. "

" 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

Miracle

" 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. "

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

" Humor is my default mode. "

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

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

John Updike

New

You

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

John Updike

Existence

Experience

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

" 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. "