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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

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
Organized
Madness
Either
Shading
Government
Permits
Benevolence
Magnitude
Permit
Peculiar

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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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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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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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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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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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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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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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.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike