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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

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
People
Conviction
Convictions
Reflection
Respectable
Ones
Offended
Lasts
Customs
Last
Admit
Facts
Fresh
Art
Mirror
Change
Mirrors
Reflections

More quotes by John Updike

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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John Updike
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
John Updike
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
John Updike
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike