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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
Extent
Daily
Others
Take
Great
Bearings
Sociable
Sane

More quotes by John Updike

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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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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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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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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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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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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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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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike