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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

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
Literature
Volunteer
Upon
Hence
Take
Foolish
Men
Madness
World
Goodness
People
Leadership
Volunteers
Leader
Erratic
Quality
Woe

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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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.
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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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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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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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.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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