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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?

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
Moments
Sheet
Past
Random
Sheets
Apparently
Shine
Vast
Shining
Darkness
Pricked

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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
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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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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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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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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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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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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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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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