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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

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
Assumed
Generally
Works
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Century

More quotes by John Updike

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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.
John Updike
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike
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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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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John Updike
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
John Updike
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike