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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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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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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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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?
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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.
John Updike
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
John Updike
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John Updike
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike