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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

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
Give
Come
Giving
Mundane
Describe
Dues
Duty
Reality
Beautiful

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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
John Updike
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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.
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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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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
John Updike
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
John Updike
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
John Updike
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
John Updike