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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.

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
Never
Lose
Loses
Feeling
Feelings
Feel
Feels
Tend
Made
Early
Things
Hold

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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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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.
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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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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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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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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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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.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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