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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

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
Sacrifice
Betrayals
Loss
Compounded
Happiness
Thing
Losses
Static
Sacrifices
Mixed
Betrayal

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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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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.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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.
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There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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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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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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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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