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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

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
Inversely
Proportional
Attraction

More quotes by John Updike

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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
John Updike
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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
John Updike
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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
John Updike
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
John Updike
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
John Updike
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
John Updike
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
John Updike
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
John Updike
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
John Updike
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
John Updike
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
John Updike
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
John Updike