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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

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
Must
Alike
Male
Males
Bodies
Messages
Signifiers
Female
Signaling
Sex
Necessities
Body
Glowing

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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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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.
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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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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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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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.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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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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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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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.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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