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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

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
Daily
Others
Take
Great
Bearings
Sociable
Sane
Extent

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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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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.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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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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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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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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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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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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Fraud makes the world go round.
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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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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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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