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

More quotes by John Updike

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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
John Updike
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
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The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.
John Updike
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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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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.
John Updike
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
John Updike
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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
John Updike
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
John Updike