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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

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
Human
Humans
Children
Members
Something
Parents
Think
Ought
Thinking
Parent
Race
Rather

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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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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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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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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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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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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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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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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