When I was in power, I found that experts can’t be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,---people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid.
John UpdikeFirst snow: it came this year late in November.
John UpdikeTags: first-sentence
Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John UpdikeDreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John UpdikeTags: to-keep-up-ur-dreams-_
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John UpdikeWhat art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John UpdikeTags: words art reading books literature
The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John UpdikeTags: prose
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.
John UpdikeI'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
John UpdikePage 1 of 15.
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