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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.

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
Differences
Alone
Must
Children
Boyhood
Would
Childhood
Difference
Boys
Environment

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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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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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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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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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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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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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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.
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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.
John Updike
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
John Updike
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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