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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
Duty
Reality
Beautiful
Give
Come
Giving
Mundane
Describe
Dues
More quotes by John Updike
Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
John Updike
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
John Updike
We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
John Updike
Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
John Updike
We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
John Updike
You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
John Updike
Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike
Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
John Updike
Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
John Updike
The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
John Updike
