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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
Lays
Drive
Saying
Doesn
Writing
Chicken
Like
Chickens
Eggs
Require

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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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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.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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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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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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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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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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