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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

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
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Unsupervised
Spirit
Vacant
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Museums
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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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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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.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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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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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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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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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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