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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.

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
Dwindle
Imitates
Dare
Artist
Art
Nature

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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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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
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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.
John Updike
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
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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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
John Updike
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
John Updike
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
John Updike
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
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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.
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