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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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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
Decision
Made
Never
Life
Cent
Cents
Selfish
Hundred
Wasn

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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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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.
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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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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.
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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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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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