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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
More quotes by John Updike
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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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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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
John Updike
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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.
John Updike
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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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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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
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
