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" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "
John Updike
Reading
Want
Child
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" 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. "
John Updike
You
Work
Try
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" My father taught only math. "
John Updike
Father
Taught
Only
" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "
John Updike
Look
Houses
Chimney
" 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. "
John Updike
Limits
Me
Writing
" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "
John Updike
Wait
Aging
Satisfaction
" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "
John Updike
Idiot
Golf
Child
" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "
John Updike
Burdened
Duty
Sense
" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "
John Updike
Return
Exile
He
" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "
John Updike
Take
Sane
Our
" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "
John Updike
After
Breath
Adultery
" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "
John Updike
Knows
Self
Own
" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "
John Updike
Arnold
Roth
Geniuses
" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "
John Updike
Door
Walls
Right
" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "
John Updike
Aim
New
Mind
" 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
Us
Some
" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "
John Updike
Looking
World
Publishers
" 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
" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
John Updike
Whatever
Been
Costs
" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "
John Updike
Pitcher
Baseball
Encompass
" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "
John Updike
Art
Spiritual
Respect
" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "
John Updike
Set
Might
Just
" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "
John Updike
Resource
More
House
" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "
John Updike
Like
Existence
Experience
" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "
John Updike
Driving
You
Life
" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "
John Updike
Lust
Meet
Roll
" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "
John Updike
Religion
Ignore
Us
" 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
" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "
John Updike
Live
Really
Just
" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "
John Updike
Year
Patience
Healthy