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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

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
Viruses
Sex
Genes
Amid
Inducements
Kill
Cosmic
Tribe
Fiendish
Health
Permit
Mate
Perfumed
Order
Invented
Tireless
Nature
Torture
Orders
Hypnotic
Way
Arise
Tribes
Irresponsibility
Proof
Mates
Permits
Following
Humankind

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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.
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Life, too much of it, and not enough. The fear that it will end some day, and the fear that tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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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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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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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.
John Updike
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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
John Updike
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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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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike