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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

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
Suddenly
Fighting
Keep
Great
Summoned
Something
Horrendous
Smallness
Reduce
Witness

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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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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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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.
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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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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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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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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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