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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

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
Death
Creatures
Earthly
Thought
Capacity
Consciously
Foreseeing
Human
Possibility
Biological
Envisioned
Humans
Conditions
Frustrated
Troubling
Question
Creature
Tribal
Animal
Complexity
Imperatives
Suffering
Possibilities
Suffers
Ability
Condition
Tense

More quotes by John Updike

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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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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.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
John Updike
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike
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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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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
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