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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

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
Fashion
Hoping
Face
Produces
Faces
Lover
Love
Beloved
Mirror
Skull
Mirrors
Skulls
Lovers
Doth
Produce
Polish

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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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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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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.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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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.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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