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" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "
John Updike
Beach
Result
Sun
Related Quotes:
" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "
John Updike
First
Wanted
Then
" 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 last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "
John Updike
Success
Uncle
Death
" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "
John Updike
Interview
Less
Mean
" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "
John Updike
Hard
Dislike
Man
" 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. "
John Updike
Life
Book
Movies
" Sex is like money; only too much is enough. "
John Updike
Sex
Only
Like
" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "
John Updike
World
Tries
Describe
" 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. "
John Updike
Transition
Pictures
Words
" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "
John Updike
Hollywood
Theme
Age
" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
John Updike
Doing
Right
Better
" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "
John Updike
Books
Us
Sense
" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
John Updike
Looking
World
Publishers
" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "
John Updike
Without
Come
Dreams
" I have never liked haircuts. "
John Updike
Liked
Haircuts
Never
" 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
More
Lovely
Serious
" Humor is my default mode. "
John Updike
Mode
Humor
Default
" 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. "
John Updike
Eyes
Enjoy
Ball
" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "
John Updike
Lonely
Light
Sidewalk
" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "
John Updike
Far Away
Away
Live
" 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. "
John Updike
Dark
Thought
Sea
" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "
John Updike
Government
Madness
Either
" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "
John Updike
Remaining
Part
True
" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "
John Updike
Bad
Remember
Reviews
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
John Updike
Honored
Only
Should
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" 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. "
John Updike
Two
Through
Poet
" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "
John Updike
Drop
Different
Overhead
" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "
John Updike
Myself
Now
Enough
" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "
John Updike
Know
Trying
Thought