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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.

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
Mature
Cry
Telling
Dead
Since
Thing
Make
Maturity

More quotes by John Updike

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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.
John Updike
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
John Updike
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
John Updike
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
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Man makes one journey all his living days, Down through the realms of music and of art Down through the halls of fame and glorious praise Down through the tears and triumphs of the heart To some sweet woman waiting some place there. For her he builds his cities and makes war, Seeks gold and glorious wealth to store.
John Updike
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
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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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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike