American - Novelist | March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
John Updike
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Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
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Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.
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My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
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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 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.
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Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.
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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.
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The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
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The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
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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.
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The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
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