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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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
Anywhere
Living
Sense
Else
True
Yorker
Believe
Kidding
People
Secretly
Believes

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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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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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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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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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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.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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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?
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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