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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.

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
Scribble
Exists
Scribbles
Word
Premises
Fact
Reads
Hope
Vast
Facts
Accidents
Foolish
Bases

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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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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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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
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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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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
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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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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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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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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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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