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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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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
John Updike
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
John Updike
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
John Updike
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
John Updike
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
John Updike