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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

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
Education
Fathers
Tortures
Wisdom
Jail
Schooled
Called
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Equipped
Literature
Schools
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Educational
Unnatural
School
Decided
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Children
Parents
Strain
Parent
Provided
Jails

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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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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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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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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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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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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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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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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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