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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

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
Humorists
Effect
Difficulty
Effects
Winning
History
Seems
Believe
Whichever

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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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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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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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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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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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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
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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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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
John Updike
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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