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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
Darkness
Pricked
Moments
Sheet
Past
Random
Sheets
Apparently
Shine
Vast
Shining

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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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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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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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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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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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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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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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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
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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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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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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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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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