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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

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
Need
Burden
Many
Older
Needs
Youth
Good
Looking
Spirit
Doe
Exempted
Look
Burdens
Looks
Foolish

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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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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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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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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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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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