Quote

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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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
Kind
Literary
Clamber
Instinct
Newcomer
Fingers
Medusa
Step
Aboard
Scene
Newcomers
Steps
Raft
Small
Sinking
Trying
Tries

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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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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.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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