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" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

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" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "

John Updike

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Infancy

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

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

John Updike

New

You

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

" 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 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

" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "

" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "

John Updike

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" Writing makes you more human. "

John Updike

You

Human

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "

" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

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

" 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. "

" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" 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. "