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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.

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
Freest
Adultery
Breathe
Firsts
First

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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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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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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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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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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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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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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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