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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
People
Secretly
Believes
Anywhere
Living
Sense
Else
True
Yorker
Believe
Kidding

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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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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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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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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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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.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
John Updike
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
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