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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.

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
High
Clearly
Instructions
Easy
Straight
Swing
Great
Balls
Swings
Make
Basic
Instruction
Rise
Finish
Golf
Charm
Worth
Sport
Quaintly
Sports
Ball
Perverse

More quotes by John Updike

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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
John Updike
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
John Updike
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
John Updike
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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?
John Updike
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike