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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. "

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" 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. "

John Updike

Privacy

Man

Manifest

" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "

" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "

" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" 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

Some

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

John Updike

People

Themselves

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

" 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. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

John Updike

Enough

Harvard

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" 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. "

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

John Updike

Plot

Having

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

" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

John Updike

Religion

Ignore

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" 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. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "

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

" 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. "