Quote

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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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
General
Billboards
Church
Promoted
Religion
Visited
Often
Bore
Without
Bores
Quenching
Churches
Weekdays
Thirst
Cola
Relation
Coca

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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.
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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.
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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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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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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.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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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.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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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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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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