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" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "
John Updike
America
Tax
Reagan
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" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "
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Go
" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "
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Shot
Make
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" People are incorrigibly themselves. "
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People
Themselves
" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "
John Updike
Old Age
Old
Age
" 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. "
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" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "
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Without
Come
Dreams
" 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 was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. "
John Updike
Tree
Age
Early
" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "
John Updike
Whatever
Been
Costs
" 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
" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "
John Updike
Star
Writer
Better
" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "
John Updike
Labels
Write
Would
" 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
" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "
John Updike
Away
Square
Wealth
" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "
John Updike
Belief
Voluntary
Must
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "
John Updike
Emotions
Memories
Rich
" 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
" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "
John Updike
Where
Rules
Extremes
" 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
" 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. "
John Updike
Support
Encouragement
Society
" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "
John Updike
You
Nobody
Better
" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "
John Updike
Even
Person
Same
" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
John Updike
Like
New
You
" 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. "
John Updike
Man
Bring
Poem
" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "
John Updike
Age
Writer
Sequels
" In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. "
John Updike
New York
New
Leaving
" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
John Updike
Best
Time
Impression
" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "
John Updike
Bad
Remember
Reviews
" 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