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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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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
Wells
Perfectionism
Well
Extreme
Self
Extremes
Acceptance
Solitude
Perfection
Creation
Enemy

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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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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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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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