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" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "
John Updike
Hollywood
Theme
Age
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" I like short stories. "
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" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "
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Creative
Creativity
Doer
" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "
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Effort
Worth
Write
" My father taught only math. "
John Updike
Father
Taught
Only
" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "
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Doing
Right
Better
" 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
" 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
" Nature refuses to rest. "
John Updike
Rest
Nature
Refuses
" All love comes from the family. "
John Updike
Family
Love
" 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
More
Difficult
Stories
" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "
John Updike
Belief
Voluntary
Must
" 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. "
John Updike
Saying
Age
Long
" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "
John Updike
Young
Writer
World
" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "
John Updike
Book
Average
Kiss
" 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. "
John Updike
Host
Loved
Year
" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "
John Updike
Early
Late
Go
" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "
John Updike
Children
Ourselves
Were
" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "
John Updike
Earth
Grace
Rain
" 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
" Authors should be honored only for their works. "
John Updike
Honored
Only
Should
" 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
" 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
" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "
John Updike
Freedom
Happiness
Individual
" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "
John Updike
You
Happy
Make
" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "
John Updike
Shoes
You
Art
" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "
John Updike
Labels
Write
Would
" 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. "
John Updike
Twice
Think
Broken
" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "
John Updike
Family
Over
Thinking
" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "
John Updike
Quality
People
Men
" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "
John Updike
Inner
Good
Us