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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.

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
Failure
Profoundest
Goes
Losers
Men
Mortal
Loser
Mortals
Failed
Loyalty
Therefore

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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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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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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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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.
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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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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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Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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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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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
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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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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
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