American - Novelist | March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009
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.
John Updike
MemoriesRichEarthEmotionsFirst
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.
GodFreedomPowerDarknessFace
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
DayAmericanTwoPayNumberWilling
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
WomenMenMeThinkWhyWitches
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
RespectWhateverBeenCostsNewness
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
PatiencePeopleYearHealthyOwn
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.
ManYoungYoung ManBringPoemOff
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
GoodReligionStoryOldUsInner
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.
LettersTwoLineThroughOwnPoet
Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
CreativityCreativeNameBetterDoer
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.
SexOwnAlikeMustOurGlowing
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
WisdomI AmNowWhySixtySee
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