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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

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
United
President
Venomous
America
Client
States
Advocating
Ungrateful
Advocate
Clients
Blind

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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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