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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
Make
Maturity
Mature
Cry
Telling
Dead
Since
Thing

More quotes by John Updike

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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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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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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.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
John Updike
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
John Updike
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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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.
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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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
John Updike
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
John Updike
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
John Updike