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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.
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
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Expanded
Wickedness
Guts
Started
Food
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More quotes by John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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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.
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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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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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.
John Updike
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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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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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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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
