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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

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
Education
Doers
Creative
Cares
Inspiring
Care
Activity
Better
Creativity
Right
Motivational
Design
Becomes
Doer

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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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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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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.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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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.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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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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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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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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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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