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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.

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
Enjoy
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Natural
Onto
Reality
Optimism
Personified
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Relation
Projected
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Atheism
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Intended

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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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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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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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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
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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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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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