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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
Writing
Chicken
Like
Chickens
Eggs
Require
Lays
Drive
Saying
Doesn
More quotes by John Updike
Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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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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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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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike
Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
John Updike
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
Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
John Updike
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
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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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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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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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
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.
John Updike
Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
Fraud makes the world go round.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
