John Updike : (8)

" 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. " - John Updike

" 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. " - John Updike

" 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. " - John Updike

" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. " - John Updike

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. " - John Updike

" 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. " - John Updike

" 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. " - John Updike

" 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. " - John Updike