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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

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
Find
Kings
Writing
Hero
Way
Writer
Make
Ways
Age
Mundane
Interesting
Heroes
Lives
Dull
Past
Basically

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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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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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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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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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.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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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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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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