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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

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
Car
Reach
Dark
Starfish
Hands
Leaping
Two
Hurry
Locked
Holding
Lovers

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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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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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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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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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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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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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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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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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