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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?

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
World
Bunch
Turned
Respect
Running
Kids

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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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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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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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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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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike