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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.

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
Drama
Memories
Read
Life
Like
Vague
Reviews
Drinking

More quotes by John Updike

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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
John Updike
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
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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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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
John Updike
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Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
John Updike
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
John Updike