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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
Living
Sense
Else
True
Yorker
Believe
Kidding
People
Secretly
Believes
Anywhere

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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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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.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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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.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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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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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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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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.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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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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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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