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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
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Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
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Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
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More quotes by John Updike
Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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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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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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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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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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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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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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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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike