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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

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
Government
Love
Extent
Leaves
Least
Alone

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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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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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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
John Updike