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" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "

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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

" All love comes from the family. "

John Updike

Family

Love

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' "

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "

" 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. "

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "

" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

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

" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "

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

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

John Updike

Books

Sense

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

" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

John Updike

Religion

Ignore

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" 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. "