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" 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

Art

Spiritual

Respect

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "

John Updike

Think

Books

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" 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. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" 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. "

" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "

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

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" Sex is like money; only too much is enough. "

John Updike

Sex

Only

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" 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. "

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

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

" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

" 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

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" 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

Myself

Things

" 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. "

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "