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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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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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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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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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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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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
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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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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
John Updike
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike