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" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "
John Updike
Art
Always
Universe
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" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "
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" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "
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" 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. "
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" My father taught only math. "
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" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "
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" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "
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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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" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "
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" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "
John Updike
Room
Pulse
Noticed
" 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. "
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Broken
" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "
John Updike
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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
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Manifest
" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "
John Updike
Space
New
Disaster
" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "
John Updike
Blind
Advocate
Ungrateful
" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "
John Updike
Year
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" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "
John Updike
Memory
Immersed
Instead
" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "
John Updike
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" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "
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Hope
Last
Up
" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "
John Updike
Hearts
New
Pleasing
" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "
John Updike
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Things
" 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
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" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "
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Why
" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "
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Sunday
" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "
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" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "
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" Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. "
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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
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Try
" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "
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