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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.

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
Accepting
Excuses
Antibodies
Lying
Deceived
Overlooks
Difficult
Deceiving
Permits
Firsts
Deceit
Repair
First
Suspicion
Accepts
Lateness
Great
Permit
Deceive
Patching
Time
Absurd
Adultery
Quotidian
Excuse
Possesses
Rents

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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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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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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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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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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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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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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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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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