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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.

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
Certain
Tumbling
Feel
Momentum
Feels
Prose
Writing
Ears
Like
Flow
Weight
Forward
Voice
Energized

More quotes by John Updike

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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
John Updike
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
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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.
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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
John Updike
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
John Updike
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
John Updike
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
John Updike
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
John Updike
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
John Updike
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
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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
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
John Updike