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

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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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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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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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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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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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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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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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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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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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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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