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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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Bookstores
Play
Museums
Feel
Demands
Feels
Lots
Think
Places
Thinking
Demand
Like
Exercise
Unsupervised
Spirit
Vacant

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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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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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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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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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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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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