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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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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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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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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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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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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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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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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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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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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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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
John Updike
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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike