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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
Somebody
Instruct
Language
Entertain
Living
Cares
Care
Larger
Country
Large
Writing
Reader
Even
Ought
Wants

More quotes by John Updike

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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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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
John Updike
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike