Top quotes by John Updike

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. Votes: 26

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. Votes: 23

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. Votes: 21

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. Votes: 21

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. Votes: 20

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. Votes: 18

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. Votes: 13

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. Votes: 12

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. Votes: 11

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. Votes: 11

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. Votes: 10

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. Votes: 10

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. Votes: 9

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. Votes: 7

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. Votes: 7

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. Votes: 7

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. Votes: 6

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. Votes: 6

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. Votes: 5

It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. Votes: 5

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Votes: 5

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. Votes: 5

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. Votes: 4

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. Votes: 4

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. Votes: 4

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. Votes: 3

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. Votes: 3

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. Votes: 3

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. Votes: 2

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. Votes: 1

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. Votes: 0

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. Votes: 0

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. Votes: 0

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. Votes: 0

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. Votes: 0

Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. Votes: 0

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. Votes: 0

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. Votes: 0

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. Votes: 0

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. Votes: 0

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. Votes: 0

I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. Votes: 0

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. Votes: 0

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. Votes: 0

There's something very reassuring... about the written record. Votes: 0

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. Votes: 0

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. Votes: 0

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. Votes: 0

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. Votes: 0

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. Votes: 0

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. Votes: 0

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. Votes: 0

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. Votes: 0

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. Votes: 0

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. Votes: 0

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. Votes: 0

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. Votes: 0

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. Votes: 0

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. Votes: 0

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. Votes: 0

Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. Votes: 0

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. Votes: 0

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. Votes: 0

[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it. Votes: 0

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given. Votes: 0

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness. Votes: 0

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. Votes: 0

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents. Votes: 0

It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. Votes: 0

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. Votes: 0

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? Votes: 0

Think binary. When matter meets antimatter, both vanish, into pure energy. But both existed; I mean, there was a condition we'll call "existence." Think of one and minus one. Together they add up to zero, nothing, nada, niente, right? Picture them together, then picture them separating-peeling apart. ... Now you have something, you have two somethings, where once you had nothing. Votes: 0

Looking foolish does the spirit good. Votes: 0

Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad, hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us. Votes: 0

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. Votes: 0

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. Votes: 0

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. Votes: 0

The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk. Votes: 0

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined. Votes: 0

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. Votes: 0

Sex ages us. Priests are boyish, spinsters stay black-haired until after fifty. We others, the demon rots us out. Votes: 0

I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size. Votes: 0

Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works. Votes: 0

Those running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display. Votes: 0

I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing. Votes: 0

I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats. Votes: 0

The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze. Votes: 0

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum. Votes: 0

In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola; they promoted thirst without quenching it. Votes: 0

Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct. Votes: 0

How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation. Votes: 0

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart. Votes: 0

If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader. Votes: 0

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. Votes: 0

Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it. Votes: 0

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party. Votes: 0

Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want. Votes: 0

I'm always looking for insights into the real Doris Day because I'm stuck with this infatuation and need to explain it to myself. Votes: 0

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Votes: 0

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. Votes: 0

I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves. Votes: 0

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being. Votes: 0

Being a famous writer is a little like being a tall dwarf. You're on the edge of normality. Votes: 0

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear. Votes: 0

Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit. Votes: 0

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire. Votes: 0

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders? Votes: 0

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things. Votes: 0

Green grass, green grandstands, green concession stalls, green paper cups, green folding chairs and visors for sale, green and white ropes, green-topped Georgia pines. If justice were poetic, Hubert Green would win it every year. Votes: 0

It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you. Votes: 0

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. Votes: 0

I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don't get hay fever in New England either. Votes: 0

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. Votes: 0

Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Votes: 0

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. Votes: 0

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. Votes: 0

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over-animation. One can either see or be seen. Votes: 0

Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. Votes: 0

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. Votes: 0

Writing fiction is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That's a nice quality if you can do it in fiction. Votes: 0

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed. Votes: 0

I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time. Votes: 0

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Mark Twain Women are an alien race set down among us. Votes: 0

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Votes: 0

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation. Votes: 0

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. Votes: 0

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. Votes: 0

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours. Votes: 0

That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded. Votes: 0

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door. Votes: 0

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. Votes: 0

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart. Votes: 0

There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America. Votes: 0

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. Votes: 0

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull. Votes: 0

Without rain, there would be no life. Votes: 0

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was. Votes: 0

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. Votes: 0

Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off. Votes: 0

So much love, too much love, it is our madness, it is rotting us out, exploding us like dandelion polls. Votes: 0

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. Votes: 0

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better Votes: 0

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another days progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper Votes: 0

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography Votes: 0

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane. Votes: 0

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. Votes: 0

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? Votes: 0

We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe Votes: 0

He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes. Votes: 0

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. Votes: 0

We are cruel enough without meaning to be. Votes: 0

No act is so private it does not seek applause. Votes: 0

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. Votes: 0

On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence. Votes: 0

Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston. Votes: 0

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly. Votes: 0

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. Votes: 0

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. Votes: 0

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. Votes: 0

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. Votes: 0

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey. Votes: 0

The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia. Votes: 0

Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. Votes: 0

How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes? Votes: 0

Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments. Votes: 0

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. Votes: 0

If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price. Votes: 0

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' Votes: 0

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' Votes: 0

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. Votes: 0

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head. Votes: 0

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. Votes: 0

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man. Votes: 0

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. Votes: 0

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. Votes: 0

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. Votes: 0

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. Votes: 0

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. Votes: 0

We are most alive when we're in love. Votes: 0

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. Votes: 0

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. Votes: 0

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. Votes: 0

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. Votes: 0

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. Votes: 0

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. Votes: 0

All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. Votes: 0

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. Votes: 0

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. Votes: 0

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. Votes: 0

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. Votes: 0

Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. Votes: 0

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. Votes: 0

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. Votes: 0

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. Votes: 0

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. Votes: 0

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. Votes: 0

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. Votes: 0

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. Votes: 0

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. Votes: 0

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. Votes: 0

I have never liked haircuts. Votes: 0

Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. Votes: 0

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. Votes: 0

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. Votes: 0

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. Votes: 0

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. Votes: 0

Belief, like love, must be voluntary. Votes: 0

Sex is like money; only too much is enough. Votes: 0

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains. Votes: 0

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage. Votes: 0

The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Votes: 0

Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape. Votes: 0

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. Votes: 0

When you look into a mirror it is not yourself you see, but a kind of apish error posed in fearful symmetry kool uoy nehW rorrim a otni ton si ti ˛ees uoy flesruoy dnik a tub rorre hsipa fo lufraef ni desop yrtemmys Votes: 0

Writers' lives break into two halves, Votes: 0

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep. Votes: 0

If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead. Votes: 0

There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say. Votes: 0

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers. Votes: 0

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. Votes: 0

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. Votes: 0

Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more. Votes: 0

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified. Votes: 0

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. Votes: 0

You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue. Votes: 0

Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. Votes: 0

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more. Votes: 0

There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first. Votes: 0

Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday. Votes: 0

An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure. Votes: 0

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain. Votes: 0

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews. Votes: 0

There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving... Votes: 0

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken. Votes: 0

I think people do look to writers to tell the truth in a way that nobody else quite will, not politicians or ministers or sociologists. A writer's job, is to, by way of fiction, somehow describe the way we live. And to me, this seems an important task, very worth doing, and I think also, to the reading public, it seems, even though they might not articulate it, it seems to them something worth doing also. Votes: 0

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share. Votes: 0

What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand. Votes: 0

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs — To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind. Votes: 0

The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. Votes: 0

I know how to choke. Given even a splinter-thin opportunity to let my side down and destroy my own score, I will seize it. Not only does ice water not run through my veins, but what runs there has a boiling point lower than body temperature. Votes: 0

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes. Votes: 0

Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art; Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise; Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store. Votes: 0

There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models. Votes: 0

Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg. Votes: 0

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip. Votes: 0

The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist. Votes: 0

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. Votes: 0

I think books should have secrets, like people do. Votes: 0

Human was the music, natural was the static. Votes: 0

One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny. Votes: 0

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end. Votes: 0

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top. Votes: 0

In the vacuum of the heart love falls forever. Votes: 0

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it. Votes: 0

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work. Votes: 0

It's spring! Farewell To chills and colds! The blushing, girlish World unfolds Each flower, leaf And blade of sod"” Small letters sent To her from God. Votes: 0

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time. Votes: 0

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability. Votes: 0

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products. Votes: 0

Love makes the air light. Votes: 0

The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly. Votes: 0

What we need is progress with an escape hatch. Votes: 0

Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do. Votes: 0

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. Votes: 0

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. Votes: 0

A photograph offers us a glimpse into the abyss of time. Votes: 0

A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light. Votes: 0

Phyllis explained to him, trying to give of her deeper self, 'Don't you find it so beautiful, math? Like an endless sheet of gold chains, each link locked into the one before it, the theorems and functions, one thing making the next inevitable. It's music, hanging there in the middle of space, meaning nothing but itself, and so moving...' Votes: 0

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due. Votes: 0

Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation. Votes: 0

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind. Votes: 0

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool. Votes: 0

There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over. Votes: 0

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it. Votes: 0

Mozart's music gives us permission to live. Votes: 0

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden. Votes: 0

Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. Votes: 0

As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven Votes: 0

The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow. Votes: 0

Don't you see, if when we die there's nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It's just an ocean of horror. Votes: 0

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them. Votes: 0

All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed. Votes: 0

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. Votes: 0

President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age? Votes: 0

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters. Votes: 0

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago. Votes: 0

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life. Votes: 0

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other. Votes: 0

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view. Votes: 0

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination. Votes: 0

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf. Votes: 0

irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it. Votes: 0

A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. Votes: 0

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea. Votes: 0

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle. Votes: 0

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts. Votes: 0

Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy. Votes: 0

Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried. Votes: 0

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties. Votes: 0

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged. Votes: 0

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story. Votes: 0

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. Votes: 0

I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto. Votes: 0

A few places are especially conducive to inspiration - automobiles, church - public places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church - little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program, and carry down to the office Monday. Votes: 0

Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time? Votes: 0

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind. Votes: 0

Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide. Votes: 0

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting. Votes: 0

I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire. Votes: 0

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. Votes: 0

I complain a lot. That's one way of coping. But I'm in a profession where nobody tells you to quit. No board of other partners tells you it's time to get your gold watch, and no physical claim is made on you like an athlete or an actress. So I try to plug along on the theory that I can still do it. I still keep trying to produce prose, and some poetry, in the hope that I can find something to say about being alive, this country, but generally the human condition. Votes: 0

The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That's one thing about your mother, she's never been bitter. Votes: 0

It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women. Votes: 0

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so. Votes: 0

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. Votes: 0

Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were... we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God. Votes: 0

Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. Votes: 0

We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies. Votes: 0

One does not go to Moscow to get fat. Votes: 0

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. Votes: 0

The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world. Votes: 0

At last, small witches, goblins, hags, And pirates armed with paper bags Their costumes hinged on safety pins, Go haunt a night of pumpkin grins. Votes: 0

Cities aren't like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. Votes: 0

You know how it is with fathers, you never escape the idea that maybe after all they're right. Votes: 0

Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways; we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard. Votes: 0

The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable. Votes: 0

All blessings are mixed blessings. Votes: 0

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands. Votes: 0

The first breathe of adultery is the freest. Votes: 0

In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up. Votes: 0

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. Votes: 0

Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence; fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go. Votes: 0

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate. Votes: 0

Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes. Votes: 0

Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago. Votes: 0

We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything Votes: 0

A woman's beauty lies, not in any exaggeration of the specialized zones, nor in any general harmony that could be worked out by means of the sectio aurea or a similar aesthetic superstition; but in the arabesque of the spine. The curve by which the back modulates into the buttocks. It is here that grace sits and rides a woman's body. Votes: 0

Hope bases vast premises upon foolish accidents and reads a word where, in fact, only a scribble exists. Votes: 0

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. Votes: 0

In no other sport must the spectator move. Votes: 0

The days are short, The sun a spark Hung thin between The dark and dark. Votes: 0

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe. Votes: 0

Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things. Votes: 0

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader. Votes: 0

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another. Votes: 0

I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish. Votes: 0

The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had; our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had. Votes: 0

Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much. Votes: 0

Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song. Votes: 0

Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader. Votes: 0

It's great to have an enemy. Sharpens your senses. Votes: 0

Women are an alien race set down among us. Votes: 0

There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals. Votes: 0

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle. Votes: 0

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet. Votes: 0

In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature. Votes: 0

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect. Votes: 0

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. Votes: 0

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified. Votes: 0

How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old? Votes: 0

...hate suits him better than forgiveness. Immersed in hate, he doesn't have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidty of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him. Votes: 0

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself. Votes: 0

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine? Votes: 0

"¦he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I'm outside or is it all America? Votes: 0

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem. Votes: 0

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline. Votes: 0

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath. Votes: 0

Accent the ugly until it becomes gorgeous. Votes: 0

Nothing feels worse than other people's good times. Votes: 0

Fraud makes the world go round. Votes: 0

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. Votes: 0

But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. Votes: 0

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives. Votes: 0

Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them. Votes: 0

Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play. Votes: 0

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living. Votes: 0

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Votes: 0

Our lives fade behind us before we die. Votes: 0

There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight. Votes: 0

...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality. Votes: 0

"Hit it with the back of your left hand" was the first swing thought I ever heard, brusquely bu not unlovingly put to me by the aunt-in-law who had moments before placed a golf club in my virgin grip. I was twenty-five, and had spent my youth in a cloisterd precinct of teh middle class where golf was a rumoured something, like champagne breakfasts and divorce, that the rich did. Votes: 0

Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer. Votes: 0

I assume my stance, and take back the club, low, slowly; at the top, my eyes fog over, and my joints dip and swirl like barn swallows, I swing. There is a fruitless commotion of dust and rubber at my feet. "Smothered it," I say promptly. After enough lessons the terminology becomes second nature. Votes: 0

I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway. Votes: 0

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead? Votes: 0

The world ... is full of people who never knew what hit 'em, their lives are over before they wake up. Votes: 0

Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup. Votes: 0

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves. Votes: 0

Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it. Votes: 0

I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. Votes: 0

You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life. Votes: 0

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. Votes: 0

All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you. Votes: 0

Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle. Votes: 0

God is in the tiger as well as in the lamb. Votes: 0

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure... Votes: 0

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards. Votes: 0

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings. Votes: 0

Time is our element, not a mistaken invader. Votes: 0

And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up. Votes: 0

It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter. Votes: 0

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions. Votes: 0

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown. Votes: 0

What other sport holds out hope of improvement to a man or a woman over fifty? True, the pros begin to falter at around forty, but it is their putting nerves that go, not their swings. For a duffer like [me], the room for improvement is so vast that three lifetimes could be spent roaming the fiarways carving away at it, convinced that perfection lies just over the next rise. And that hope, perhaps, is the kindest bliss of all that golf bestows upon its devotees. Votes: 0

The great thing about the dead, they make space. Votes: 0

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway. Votes: 0

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it. Votes: 0

So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer's career and that we shouldn't worry about what we're not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know. Votes: 0

The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself. Votes: 0

I'm not against TV; I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go. Votes: 0

What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold. Votes: 0

You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form. Votes: 0

Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists. Votes: 0

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page Votes: 0

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either. Votes: 0

The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes. Votes: 0

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer. Votes: 0