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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
Gesture
Fatal
Gestures
Begin
Seems

More quotes by John Updike

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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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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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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
John Updike
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
John Updike
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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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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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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.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
John Updike
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike