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" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "

John Updike

Victory

Rocks

Win

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" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

" 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. "

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

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

John Updike

Books

Sense

" 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. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

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

" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "

" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" 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

Writing

" 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. "

" To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. "

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

" 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 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. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

John Updike

Prolific

Tend

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" My father taught only math. "

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

" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "