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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.

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
Seems
Gesture
Fatal
Gestures
Begin

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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
John Updike