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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.

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
Clue
Nobody
Really
Things

More quotes by John Updike

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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
John Updike
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
John Updike
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike