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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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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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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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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
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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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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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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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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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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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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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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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