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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.

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
Fats
Camaraderie
Golf
Explorers
Based
Transcendence
Common
Golfers
Experience
Scratch
Together
Astronaut
Never
Scratches
Antarctic
Like
Thin
Astronauts

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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.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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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 difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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