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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

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
Country
Large
Writing
Reader
Even
Ought
Wants
Somebody
Instruct
Language
Entertain
Living
Cares
Care
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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.
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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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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
John Updike
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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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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.
John Updike
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
John Updike