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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.

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
Drive
Saying
Doesn
Chicken
Writing
Chickens
Like
Eggs
Require
Lays

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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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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.
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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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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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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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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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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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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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike