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

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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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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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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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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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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.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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