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" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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 interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" 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. "

John Updike

Plot

Having

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" We are most alive when we're in love. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

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

" 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. "

John Updike

Excess

Some

" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

John Updike

Everything

Because

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

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

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

John Updike

Enough

Harvard

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

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" I'm a dull person. "

John Updike

Dull

Person

" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "

" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "