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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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
Able
Shields
Writing
Instantly
Kind
Transforming
Way
Hiding
Honey
Becomes
Pain
Write
Shield

More quotes by John Updike

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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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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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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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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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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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
John Updike
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
John Updike
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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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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike