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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.

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
Like
Surface
Whose
Students
Gives
Shimmering
Present
Contents
Without
Succession
Play
Clue
Giving
Equipment

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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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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.
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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.
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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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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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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.
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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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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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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?
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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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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