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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
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Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Believe
Kidding
People
Secretly
Believes
Anywhere
Living
Sense
Else
True
Yorker
More quotes by John Updike
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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
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
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
John Updike
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?
John Updike
School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
John Updike
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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
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
Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
John Updike
The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
John Updike
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
John Updike
