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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
Given
Harvard
Stills
Liberating
Still
Notion
Enough
Learning
Years
Education
Teach
Four
Learn

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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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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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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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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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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.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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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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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike