“The first draft of everything is shit.”

-Ernest Hemingway.

“The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.”

-Dorothy Parker.

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human experience.”

-E. E. Cummings.

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

-Mark Twain.

And I love that it’s a real book too.

“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down.  That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”

-J.D. Salinger.

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it – don’t cheat with it.”

-Ernest Hemingway.

“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”

-George Bernard Shaw.

Krusty: “What’s your name again?”

Man: “John Updike.”

Krusty: “Whoa, whoa! I didn’t ask for your life story!”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike passed away yesterday at the age of 76 (which is just a bit selfish), and I wish I could say it had affected me more. But I’ve actually never read a single one of his novels. I may have read a short story or two of his a while back, but not the novels. Not the Rabbit novels, and not even the Eastwick books, though I have watched the film, and was curious to read the book, which I know is quite a bit different. There was a weird bit of synergy there when I discovered after watching the movie that the novel’s sequel, The Widows Of Eastwick was coming out about a month later. I have that, but also, have not read it.

“A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries” is an interesting appraisal of the author for Michiko Kakutani.

“A&P” by John Updike.

Updike was also the subject of Nicholson Baker’s U And I: A True Story, which is basically an examination of the author and contains Baker’s hurt feelings that Updike chose Tim O’Brien as his golf partner and not Baker. I’ve wanted to read this book for some time now, but just haven’t gotten around to it.

And then there’s David Foster Wallace pondering if Updike is (or now was) the last of the great narcissists.

And then, of course, there’s always Vonnegut motivational posters.