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. John Updike More Quotes by John Updike More Quotes From John Updike 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. John Updike oceanfieldssun 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. John Updike golfsportslying Without rain, there would be no life. John Updike would-berain 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. John Updike operagovernmentencouragement 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. John Updike fogeyegolf 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. John Updike eyehurtreality A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward. John Updike turnsconsciousnessself From the standpoint of a Middle Eastern citizen, Americans look like a bully forcing our way of life on the Islamic way of life. The notion of purity is very important in Islam, and a lot of the negative warlike actions taken against us have to do with our physical presence in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was trying to get the American, or protesting the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. It's not surprising that our strong presence in Iraq has produced a wave of resistance anger, extreme anger in some cases, and a permissive atmosphere that allows these people to go undetected. John Updike strongtakenmilitary You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact. John Updike voicemotherwriting In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures. John Updike issueswritingadventure Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family. John Updike childhoodstruggleamerica I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn't dampen your own creativity - in the broadest sense - with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action. John Updike dreambelievecountry Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. John Updike becomingcarefiction Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it. John Updike mysteriousmusicianpeople My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway. John Updike raisescriticsmother 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. John Updike humanitywritingmay 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. John Updike numbersbookhands 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. John Updike writingbooklooks 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. John Updike designtryingbook 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 John Updike bookinterestingthinking
