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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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
Aging
Wisdom
Age
Idea
Elder
Ideas
Elders
Time
Sixty
Currency
Passed

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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?
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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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?
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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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.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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