Quote

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.

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
Good
Steps
Kept
Exclusive
Things
Emotion
Memory
Realm
Memories
Conscience
Sensations
Faith
Physical
Consumption
Reality
Asking
Aside
Self
Step
Realms
Selves
Trying
Exist
Precious
Sensation
Believe
Growth
Intention
Materialism

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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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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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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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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?
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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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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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.
John Updike