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"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better."
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"What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ['Give me more images']"

"The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."

"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."

"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."

"The longer Ellen Cherry thought about it, the more convinced she became that the mission of the artist in an overtechnologized, overmasculinized society was to call the old magic back to life.Could it be done? Yeah, you pessimistic wimps, it could. Could she do it? Probably not, but she could give it a whirl."

"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."

"The great poet Hafiz says that you should dye your prayer-carpet with wine if your teacher tells you to do so."

"I do not attachany exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life isthere to be lived rather than to be written about. My aimis to search out the manifold experience that it offers,wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents.I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishmentwhich does not absorb but rather adds pleasure toexistence. And as for posterity-damn posterity."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."
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