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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
Believe
Whichever
Humorists
Effect
Difficulty
Effects
Winning
History
Seems

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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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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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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.
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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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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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