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

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

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" 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. "

" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

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

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

" 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.' "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

" 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. "

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

" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

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

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

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

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

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

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" 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. "

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

" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

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

" 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. "