Quote

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.

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
Paper
Quicksand
Progress
Misty
Willing
Greet
Morning
Muster
Though
Dazzling
Faces
Fog
Marsh
Another
Blank
Chilled
Character
Characters
Marshes

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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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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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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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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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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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