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

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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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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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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
John Updike
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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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