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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.

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
Lacking
Sing
Song
Another
Nothing

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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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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.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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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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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
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Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.
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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 cruel enough without meaning to be.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
John Updike