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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

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
Self
Display
Invented
Instrument
Instruments
Mankind
Fiction
Less
Subtlest
Nothing
Examination

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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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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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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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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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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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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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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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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.
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