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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

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
Seeming
Quality
Wrong
Firsts
First
Right
Way
Things

More quotes by John Updike

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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
John Updike
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
John Updike
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
John Updike
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
John Updike
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
John Updike
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
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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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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike