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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

John Updike

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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Space
Artist
Appreciation
Spirit
Breathing
Art
Offers
Certain
Room
Rooms
Teacher
Literature

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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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