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

More quotes by John Updike

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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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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.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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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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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
John Updike
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
John Updike
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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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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
John Updike
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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