John Updike

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INTERVIEWER

Well, you're not only a writer but a famous one. Are you experiencing any disadvantages in being famous?


UPDIKE

I'm interviewed too much. I fight them off, but even one is too many. However hard you try to be honest or full, they are intrinsically phony. ... In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. You leave the proper ground of your strength and become one more gassy monologuist. Unlike Mailer and Bellow, I don't have much itch to pronounce on great matters, to reform the country, to get elected Mayor of New York...

-- John Updike at The Paris Review (Winter 1968)

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Sylvia

I think this is from her college years, perhaps spending the summer working as a kind of home-assistant to a rich doctor family.

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Somehow, I think, I have a delicious feeling of presumptuousness which comes perhaps from a secret enjoyment of living with rich people and listening to and observing them. It is like hearing a supposedly confidential conversation. You wonder only how you can ever bear to live anywhere else, away from the sea, the physical ease, the sun, the spaciousness.

-- Sylvia Plath, “The Unabridged Journals”

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