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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.

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
Ends
Matter
Good
Always
Zapped
Life
Video
Game
Games

More quotes by John Updike

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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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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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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.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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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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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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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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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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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
John Updike
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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?
John Updike
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
John Updike
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John Updike
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
John Updike