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" 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

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" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

John Updike

Everything

Because

" 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. "

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "

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

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

" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

John Updike

Difficult

Stories

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "

" 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. "

" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "

" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

" 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

House

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

" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "