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

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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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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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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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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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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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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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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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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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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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