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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

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
Betrayal
Best
Men
Love
Life
Flatters
Loveless
Armed

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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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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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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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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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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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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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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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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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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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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.
John Updike
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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