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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

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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
Learn
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Harvard
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Liberating
Still
Notion
Enough
Learning
Years
Education
Teach
Four

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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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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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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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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.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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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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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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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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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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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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