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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.

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
Doubt
Rush
Hours
Traffic
Words
Lots
Moments
Patience
Like
Mouth
Mouths
Tunnel
Hour
Jam
Inside
Tunnels

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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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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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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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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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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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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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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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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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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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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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