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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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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 heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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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.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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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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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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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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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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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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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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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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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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