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

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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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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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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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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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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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 all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
John Updike