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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.

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
Cruel
Meaning
Without
Enough

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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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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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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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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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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.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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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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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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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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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike