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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

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
Makes
Obsession
Adventurers
Willingness
Obsessions
Content
Distinguishes
Artists
Adventurer
Rest
Entertainers
Risk
Refusal
Literature
Behalf
Artist
Excess

More quotes by John Updike

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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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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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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
John Updike
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
John Updike
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
John Updike
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike