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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

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
Gold
Baby
Longer
Art
Like
Coat
Coats
Worn
Shoes

More quotes by John Updike

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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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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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
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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
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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 first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
John Updike
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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?
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