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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
Cents
Selfish
Hundred
Wasn
Decision
Made
Never
Life
Cent

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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.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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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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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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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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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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