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

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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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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.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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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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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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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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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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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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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
John Updike