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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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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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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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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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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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