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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
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Creative
Cares
Care
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Right
Creativity
Motivational
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Doer
More quotes by John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John Updike
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
We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
